(re-post)
The society of the boarding house centred in the kitchen and by the end of the first week Timken had ingratiated himself into the lives of all the childless citizens.
Megan once observed to Max that TK was less a child than some she could mention, with a tilt of one of her solid braids in Marnie Marchoff’s direction –who was whining to Mr. Fitzgerald Fitzhenry that just when she found a pair of shoes to suit her they stopped making them.
Coming so late, so unplanned, so totally unexpected into Arie’s life, and with her inexperience around children, she coped with a child as seemed fit: she treated him as a visitor she hoped knew the rules of the house. Mostly he complied.
Her own mother, having taken such drastic measures to assure that she never again be so overwhelmed with responsibility, was rather heroic in her dealing with the situation.
When later Timken considered that the two people who had most to do with his upbringing were so unlikely a couple to raise a child properly he concluded that they likely did so by default. He felt his childhood was quite ideal and the year at the boarding house a bonus.
The kitchen was big and seemed to expand as needed. Megan, who spent most of her time there, drew people to her.
“All Romes pass through this kitchen,” Max had once pronounced, then, to the blank looks, had amended, “All lives pass through this kitchen.”
Arie spent much time in her chair in the window of their suite in the Impossible Wing – watching, certainly, but if the emotion was dread mixed with hope she did not keep track of the changing percentage of each. But she was aware of them. Oh yes, she was aware.
(written around the mostly blank page of advertisement from a magazine) Sept 18 – what exactly did I think he would do, pick him up and run away, he could find us here I am sure couldn’t he if he wanted to, so what made – makes? – me so afraid. Oh I just don’t want anyone to know.
Timken, once he realized he could no longer watch his mother unnoticed also ‘passed through’ the kitchen.
Megan, not knowing the size of a five year old but responding to the imminent arrival of a child, had dug out high chair and booster chair from one of the storage rooms. They had been purchased when the bed and breakfast plan was in effect. The high chair was soonest trotted back to the storage area by Cousin once Timken was on site but he was intrigued by the booster seat, by how it could be turned one way for one height, another for another. The higher level squished his legs under the table top but the lower level gave him elevation over the table – and its occupants – that he quite liked. So it was left on his chair for eating. For other activities at the table – drawing, observing, sorting his puzzles – he sat on the bare chair and put the booster seat on the floor for his feet to rest upon.
Sometimes Silly Sylvie would crawl under the table and sit hunched on the booster chair and he would push her along with his feet until he had enough space to rest his ankles on her shoulders. It would make them both laugh. Sylvie’s mother would say, “Don’t be silly, Sylvie.”
Megan watched Timken. She wanted a child desperately but was terrified of the procedure from conception to birth. She thought she would be quite good at mothering if she could just get past the making of the baby part. She’d never confided her fears to anyone. Everyone just thought she was having a hard time getting pregnant. Her doctor never thought to ask her to tell him what was wrong and would tell her there was “nothing wrong” and “just relax.”
Megan practiced her maternal skills on Timken. She thought Arie was too casual as a mother but that the reason Marnie Marchoff’s children never visited her with their kids was because Mrs. Marchoff was too critical and interfering.
“How are you doing today?” Megan would ask Timken each morning in what she thought was a caring tone.
“Fine,” he would answer, sensitive to the nuance in her voice but not knowing what the make of it.
The one time he told her his toe hurt (he’d aimed a playful kick at Mrs. Poughkeepsie’s cat, missed and hit the hall radiator) Megan had made him take off his sock so she could examine it. Her hands were wet and cold and wrinkled from washing the sand from spinach leaves in the sink and his recoil was from this but she thought it was from the hurt of the injury. She’d jolted Arie into concern and suggested they take him to Emergency for an x-ray.
Arie told her, “RD says you can’t do anything for a broken toe, just protect it from further injury.” Megan wondered who Ardie was but was too polite to inquire.
Then, about every fifteen minutes, Megan would ask Timken, “How’s your toe now?”
He went back to answering her daily greeting with “Fine. Just fine.” And the slight emphasis added further to her opinion that he was “deep”.
In the first week Max brought home a children’s book from the bookstore where he worked, a colorful European offering with bright pictures and simple script. Timken accepted it and put it beside him on the table.
“Aren’t you going to look at it?” Max asked after a moment or two. Timken did just that by directing his eyes.
Max laughed, thinking the kid was trying to be funny, and said, “No, I mean open it and look inside.”
“I don’t really like books,” Timken said.
“Then how are you ever going to learn to read?” Megan asked, startled out of her intent to speak to him always with understanding and not judgement.
“Oh, I know how to read,” Timken said, surprised that they thought he couldn’t. Since they were both looking at him he opened the book and read the first page which happened to be the publication data. Then he read the dedication. It seemed enough and besides, he was aware that Megan and Max had exchanged looks and that he had been believed.
They did not ask how he had learned to read and if they had he really could not have told them. It seemed he had always known.
Neither Arie nor her mother were readers of books but they devoured magazines and newspapers. His grandmother was private in her reading habits but from his birth Arie, with him in her lap, would share what she was reading out loud. As he got older she would run her finger along the lines as she read. He could read headlines first. His first words were rather journalistic. Then he captured content.
When Arie realized he could read she stopped voicing the words but he continued to sit on her lap as she read. He became a fast reader in order to keep up with her and finish before she turned the page.
“What do you like?” Max asked.
“Puzzles,” he said promptly. So the next time someone left a puzzle in the exchange box at the bookstore Max brought it home to Timken. By then he was aware the puzzles need not be suited for a five year old nor even have all their pieces. Timken never put puzzles together.
“He’s an odd kid,” Max told Megan.
“He certainly is different,” she agreed.
“Odd,” said Max.
Truth was Timken sorted the puzzle pieces and this gave him much satisfaction, much more than the thought of trying to make a picture that was on the box from all the pieces. He couldn’t see the point of this. You already had the picture on the box. Why make it again.
His grandmother did that, endlessly, with such concentration that she would ignore – or not hear – the phone, the doorbell, even someone speaking to her.
The moment it was finished, however, she lost interest and Timken could have it. He immediately broke it apart. Carefully, so as not to damage the pieces.
He brought four of these puzzles with him to the boarding house and added to the collection the ones Max brought him, the ones he got as gifts. He never threw them away and the number would grow into the thousands over his lifetime. And he would never ever put one together.
He never tired of sorting. Once he had sorted, he mixed the pieces up together and might start to sort again right away. There were endless variations.
He sorted by color and this was his favorite. There would be definite piles, definitely red, definitely brown, definitely yellow. These piles would evoke satellite piles of their own. Ones that were mostly red but tinged with other colors. Red with brown. Red with orange. Red with blue. Red with more blue. Red with more brown. Endless.
He would breathe differently when he sorted. A more audible intake and output of air. He would rest his head on his hand, twine fingers through his hair, grab and release the curls.
Megan would watch him. She longed to ask him what he was thinking in his absorption but if she spoke at all, even to ask if he would like a glass of juice, the spell got broken. She had no means of entering his world.
Arie stayed in her suite.
(on a flattened toilet paper roll, the writing getting tinier and tinier ) Oct 2 Megan says he is no trouble with her in the kitchen, so why am I worrying he might be a nuisance. Is it any different from him being in the kitchen with his grandmother. I guess not. I shouldn’t feel guilty. I shouldn’t feel I should be doing something with him or just having him near me. I get so tense when he goes for a walk with Mrs Marc – I mean Marnie. RD says you can get neurotic if you worry too much. I don’t think I am but I don’t know. I’ll think about something else. I’ll think about Paris.
There is a Canal and a Left Bank in Paris. She’d never been there. She’d meant to go that year she got herself a passport. The year before she turned thirty. She had enough holidays, enough money. But she hadn’t gone. She could go now. Take Timken. She’d need a new passport. Need one for him. Her name was on his birth certificate. There would be nothing to stop her.
There was a river, of course. That’s what a canal was. A river contained. There would be sunlight on the cement walls holding the river in. She’d lift Timken – she could feel the weight of him – up onto the cement – the Left Bank – and keep her hands resting on the warmth of the stone. She could hear the French being spoken around them. She knew some French in spite of being an English Canadian. And it would be much better because she would get records and they would learn more before they went. She could hear the voices warm with the weather and rich with the language. Monsieur. Madame. Mister. Mrs. There was no comparison.
TK would love it. She could see him sitting on the cement as he turned his head this way and that, back and forth, trying to see it all at once. “Don’t tip yourself into the Seine,” she laughingly cautioned him.
“I won’t,” he told her. “It smells funny.”
“You’d smell funny too if you were that old.” Old Man River, he just keeps flowing, he just keeps flowing along. Not the same river as in the song but that’s what must have given her thought of its age.
“I want another bread like we had,” he said, motioning toward an outdoor café. She kept her hands protectively beside him as he gestured at the tables with striped umbrellas.
“Brioche,” she told him. “Say it. Brioche. Repetes après moi.”
“I know how. Prends moi une brioche, s’il vous plait, garcon.” And his accent was perfect.
She looked across the canal to the other bank and a man in a beret crossed her vision. A black haired, curly haired boy of a man.
Arie leapt uncomfortably into the present, into her suite. There was indeed a man walking along across the street but he was not young, he did not have black curly hair.
She clenched the magazine in her lap and started to read.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie stayed in her suite except for a walk now and then down the hall to the front door.
Once or twice she wandered into the nucleus of the kitchen but it made her cranky for some reason. The Thomas of her dreams clashed with the Timken at the table and suddenly Megan’s braids were outlandish and the table too large and the socks on the boy looked grubby and even her cat purring against her leg was annoying. So she went slowly back to her own room and played out scenes much as Arie did in the room above her. But she was reliving events that had actually happened, if somewhat diminished, if somewhat embellished.
Her favorites were when the children were small and she had felt beautiful and needed.
Everyone else drifted toward the kitchen.
Sometimes so many of them were clustered around the huge table when it was time for a meal that Megan would not bother to serve it in the dining room. “Let’s do a breakfast,” she would say and people would help by clearing off whatever had accumulated on the long wide table since breakfast had been served and removed.
Then they would, without comment, resume the positions they normally took at mealtimes.
“Odd,” Max had observed about this.
“Creatures of habit,” Megan had agreed. “I do it myself. I feel in the wrong place if I’m not in my place. Makes me itch.”
Cousin was not a poor relation. He was not a relative at all.
At breakfast one morning the talk had touched on relationships; sometimes one topic could hold the entire meal but usually it bounced from item to item. This time it was a haphazard selection and Cousin had expanded his arms as he stated, “…like this ‘family’” he gave it all three syllables, “and yet none of us is blood related – except Arie and her son, of course.”
Arie had been semi-absent in a portrayal to do with a meal far removed from the present setting and when she realized she was being spoken about she felt a need to offer an answer. “I thought you were related to Megan. Or Max.”
“Oh, no, whatever gave you – oh, of course – no – “he paused to chuckle and wipe crumbs from his face onto the hairy backs of his knuckles. “Cousin is my name. I’m named after my mother, her maiden name, don’t you see. Except it was Cousins. So I was actually named Cousins.” He was not usually so talkative but at times something would loosen and he would pour forth eloquently, much like the elegant script that flowed from his pen in response to the requests for his calligraphy services.
He took another quick swipe at his face. Really, crumbs seemed to be able to crawl embarrassingly all over his face. “But when I was nine or so I said, ‘It’s Cousin from now on. There is only one of me.’”
The rest of the residents had heard this before so only one or two gave a smile into the waiting beam of his face. Arie laughed delightedly and he passed her the jam, courteously pleased. And Arie was pleased. To be passed the jam without having to ask for it was not to be taken lightly. Max’s homemade jam was much in demand and Megan complained that the residents would eat up a whole year’s supply before you knew it so she put out a certain amount each day and tended not to hear any hints at request for more.
“There’s only one of me but I have two names,” Timken said after a bit of thinking.
“Condensed,” added Arie. She was fond of condensations. RD provided her with many. Life seemed sometimes too short for the entire version of what the outer world had to offer. Often she was in a hurry to get back to what her inner life so satisfyingly provided.
“Are you named after your father?” Marnie Marchoff asked. She wasn’t trying to be waspish but this came out in that tone because she was finished her breakfast and badly wanted to take her morning walk (“my constitutional,” she called it) so she could sneak a cigarette. She could have smoked in the boarding house – Megan frowned at those who did so at the table – but she kept up the pretense of being a non-smoker. And she did not want to miss anything in the breakfast society circle.
“No,” Arie answered, aware of the rather startled and then speculative look on Timken’s face. “I just liked the names.”
“Oh,” Marnie could not let it go. “What is his father’s name?”
It was rude and none of her business. Arie could have ignored her and had the full support of the others but she was moved to the old standby at mention of TK’s paternity. “I’m a single parent.”
It was not as acceptable a term as it would become and it cautherized Marnie’s tongue.
It also caused Cousin to quickly ask, “How did you come by your name if you don’t mind me asking? Arie. It’s unusual. Oh and very pretty, I might add. It suits you.”
“I don’t mind telling. When I was little – I don’t remember this – apparently I used to pester the next door neighbor with my chatter and he was Irish and kind and would say, ‘Oh, ayre ye, now?’ when I said I was going to do this or that.” She gave a passable accent imitation. “And somehow people started calling me Arie over that. I don’t know how.” She looked so cute and apologetic that Max unconsciously patted her hand.
Timken usually was fascinated by the foodstuffs that collected on the back of Cousin’s hairy hands – he did not wear the fingerless gloves with the excema medication at meal times – but at this breakfast Timken had closed down and ceased to eat. Then he slipped away.
Arie found him crouched into the corner beside the radiator in their suite. He had licked the side of it over and over but stopped when he heard her approach.
“What is it?” She was used to him withdrawing into upset but it was a rare occurrence.
“I never knew that.”
“What? About my name? Yes you did. You’ve heard me explain. Why, the last time was just last – “
“No. I mean – I mean about my father.”
Arie swallowed herself into her chair, slowly seating herself in reverse, the walk of the hands along the arms, the adjustment of feet, the slow lowering. Timken could not help but watch the ritual but he was not as interested this time.
He had never thought to ask about his father before. He had heard her say, “I’m a single parent,” sure enough, but until now that had explained what he had not needed to ask.
This time she had said “I’m a single parent” and the tone – or the time – left space for questions – for not asking questions, like the others had not then asked, Marnie into silence, Cousin in his change of topic. Timken sensed all this.
“What do you mean?” Arie asked. Not that she had not considered how to answer when he asked, as she knew he one day would. She had several answers ready to suit time or age. She had engaged in many portrayals over these. But these were all constructed at the Big House, before the arrival of the black curly haired person, before their flight.
“Where is my father?” Timken asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t know,” she repeated when he did not reply but just stared at her.
He got up from the floor in the corner, got up awkwardly and slowly, got up like an old man stiff with age. He walked over to her and stood before her. Both were totally without expression as they stared at each other. Then she opened her arms to him and they hugged but he did not crawl onto her lap, he never would again. He walked away and went back to the kitchen, to helping Cousin clear the breakfast things.
“Hello Mr. Two Names, One Boy,” Cousin greeted him and Megan cringed when she saw the child halt, turn and retreat. Cousin looked horrified and was about to go after him but Megan stopped him. “Let him go, he’ll be back,” she said. And he was. A minute or so later. Satisfied, somehow. “Two names, one boy,” he agreed and began to wipe down the salt and pepper shakers as he had seen Megan do. “Two names, one boy, wiping off jammy fingermarks from sloppy people who should know better,” he said cheerily, causing Cousin to laugh and Megan to cringe again; she did not realize she must have spoken aloud while performing this task in the past. For once, a rarity, he ‘told’ out loud so that others heard him. But inside his head the name ‘Edward’ sounded again and again.
“What is my father’s name?” he had asked in the minute absence from the kitchen, standing in the doorway of the suite, his head against the frame, his tongue inches from a reassuring lick, but he contained himself as he waited on an answer. Arie turned her eyes toward him but she was looking at something distant.
She didn’t know. But she couldn’t tell him that. She spoke the name that she used in most of her portrayals.
“Edward.”
And Timken silently mouthed it as he skipped back to the kitchen,
from that time aware of ‘father’, that he must have one.
Arie, in her chair in the suite, looked across the street. She sorted through the portrayals she had visioned across the years, the scenes where Timken would query fathering and she would tell him.
Timken was older in all of them. Ten or eleven. Not five. The portrayals always assumed earlier sequences, there were no voids.
A long lean Timken (at five he was rather squat and square) would be riding a lovely bike around a village green in a New England town much like the one Arie had visited with her parents when she was eleven, the year before her father had died.
Timken rode around and around, scattering brilliant leaves. Did all people visit New England in the autumn, carry only colored memories. There was a chill in the air and he had on a scarf that v’d back from his neck as he rode.
Arie was on a bench beside the statue of the town’s founder. She liked her portrayals based on fact to be as true as possible and she had a bit of a wonder if that statue actually had existed or if she had conjured it from pictures seen since then. She was enjoying the sun and the sounds a squirrel made digging in the fallen leaves. The squirrel dashed away as Timken skidded to a halt.
“What was my father like?” he asked, smiling, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
“Oh, well, he was very nice and kind and – “ she then pointed (a habit she did not allow herself or Timken to develop in real life) across the Green to the row of shops where a man was coming down some cement steps. “He looked like that man, actually, “ she said.
Timken looked but the distinguished older gentleman of all the previous portrayals was now a black haired, curly haired – boy.
Arie sat up in her chair in disgust and dismay.
“Now what am I going to do?” she ‘wrote’ but was too unnerved to reach out for anything on which to write, with which to write, so her inscription remained in her mind.
Timken mantra’ed “Edward, Edward, Edward…” as he cleaned the shakers.
Megan, sorting through the vegetable bin was hoping if Sylvie’s mother showed up today with an offering it would be of the potato variety, thinking, as she watched Timken, that fathers were important.
Arie, in her room in her chair in the Impossible Wing, was living the importance of fathers in her remembering. She never risked touching the reality with portrayals for some reason. Perhaps it was that enough memory poured in when her mind inquired so that she never needed to embellish, to construct.
Hers had been an adequate father, she supposed, in that she had nothing startling to get by, no dark areas that balked at investigation. He went to work, he came home, he read the paper, he listened to the radio, he sometimes fixed things around the house, he raked leaves and shoveled snow. Twice he had taken them on holidays where they had to drive and stay overnights in hotels, once to Vermont and once to Niagara Falls. Did they have fun? She couldn’t remember. In the memories of him she was always so young. In the few pictures she looked like a big baby, round of face and body, curly haired. He looked ordinary. She had to stare at a picture of him to recall what he looked like. Her mother was always squinting in pictures. She had issues with her husband that somehow seemed to not have affected Arie when he was alive. On his death she still looked young but she grew up inside. She had some notion that her father used to call her “Pumpkin” but she never asked her mother about this. Her mother never spoke of him at all.
Funny, she thought, how you could live with such gaps in your life and never question them. Perhaps that was what RD meant about “skirting an issue.” But, she questioned, surely you needed to be aware of an issue to “skirt” it.
And maybe it was the change in her mother that made her father pale in memory.
The day after the funeral Arie’s mother cut off her hair. All of it. As close to her head as she could get with the scissors.
The eleven-year-old Arie was horrified when she came home from school (her teacher had been surprised that she came to school the day after her father was buried) and found her naked-headed mother sweeping up the mass of her hair and then going out to throw it on the garden. “Supposed to be good for the soil,” she commented as if she was tossing out grass clippings. Many years later Arie had the sudden notion that perhaps she had said, “soul, good for the soul.”
“Daddy loved your long hair,” Arie said, more bewildered than accusatory.
“I know,” was all her mother replied but how she said it silenced Arie then and forever on the subject.
Then, as her school bag thumped against her leg as they walked back into the house Arie suddenly asked, “What about parents night on Friday. You can’t go like that.”
“Your father never went,” her mother said. In that final tone. And that was that.
Arie had other worries. A group of girls at school that day had stopped talking when she came near and it was awkward.
“We’re sorry about your Dad,” one finally said.
“Don’t be sad,” said another, patting her. Arie only then felt sad because it had been suggested. She had been reflecting her mother’s reaction to the death. Stony.
The girls liked Arie. She was harmless and they could make nice with her and it made them feel good.
“I hope you don’t have to move” was the next comment and this cut through her playing the role they expected because she had none of her own.
“Move?”
“Well, you know, if you can’t, I mean, your Dad gone and your mother and you all alone in that big house.”
She must have seemed on the verge of tears because they shushed each other with looks and were a silently supportive group until the bell rang.
“Do we have to move?” she asked her mother who was looking at her nearly hairless head in the mirror in the kitchen, curiously, as if at a stranger.
“Move? No, of course not. Why?”
“Well, I mean, Daddy’s gone and you don’t work.”
“Oh, that. No, it’s fine. There’s money.” She didn’t touch her bristley hair. She just kept looking at it. Or the absence of it. Her mother was still beautiful in spite of the ugly haircut, Arie thought.
“But won’t it run out?” she wanted to know. Her allowance sometimes did not last the week.
“No,” her mother answered.
And Arie was reassured. If she spent all her allowance and needed more money it was always given to her. “James, your daughter needs –“ and her mother would name the amount and the reason and her father would give it to her. Obviously this was going to continue.
Her mother’s hair grew but she kept it short in a neat if not stylish cut.
When her mother’s brother showed up from somewhere in the States he stared at his sister’s hair but didn’t say anything. Arie had no idea her mother had a brother, that she had an uncle.
“Your father never liked me so I kept my distance,” this stranger told Arie.
He stayed a week. He taught Arie how to play canasta, took pictures of them and showed Arie and her mother how to use the camera so they could take a picture of him with each of them, sent them copies when he got them developed.
“You could stay,” her mother told him. “There’s plenty of room. It’s your house too.”
Arie didn’t know what she meant by this. But her uncle left.
(written on a piece of jagged wall paper that had peeled away from the wall on the back stairs to the attic, no date)
My Uncle Kenneth escaped her.