Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Maud faced him coldly. “Only an idiot mistakes a mound of gold for manure. See things as they are beyond your nose — men are more forgiving when there’s business happening all around, and more true in their brotherhood when they don’t have the big social camera eye always on them.” She began to eat methodically. “You mark it on the wall — village life in a white man’s country is poison, even if the village used to be a black one. The city — that’s the only going forward.”

Samuel laid down his fork. “You speak as though man has the ability to walk through walls. And it is true, walls do go down — Aster itself has seen it. But until they go down, they are impassable. And if you have so much fog in your eyes that you cannot see it, well, that’s when trouble comes.” He tipped his glass against his lips, bitterly aware that only the thinnest drop of water crossed them. “The Greeks, the Italians, the Dutch, the Portuguese, even these few third-worlders, they have wiped the fog from their eyes. Calgary has left them empty-palmed. Edmonton has left them empty-palmed.”

“Aster’s nothing but a way station for the city-bound.”

The room filled with the sounds of cutlery scraping plates, the lope of the ceiling fan cutting the heat in the room. These moments were familiar to Ama, and she grudgingly began (in fact, she suspected they waited for it) to banter casually with the twins on either side of her. Mostly she told anecdotes of no interest, jokes about nothing, but it had the effect of slackening a rope almost towed to threads. The whole family listened to her misfired wit in distracted agitation, and Ama went doggedly on, because there was nothing else to do.

In the midst of her chatter the doorbell rang. Its voice had dried over the years and now sounded like a dog’s whimper. Samuel rose to answer it.

A couple stood on the porch. Their skin, and indeed their clothes, were so uniformly white they might have climbed from a salt mine. This pallor, along with a well-fed corpulence, made the woman look much younger than she undoubtedly was. She had shrewd, vaguely blue eyes, her mouth filled with crooked teeth. She was so fat that even her smile looked like an immense effort under all that skin.

The man, for all his age, looked athletic. Less muscular than simply well built, his broad, heavily veined forearms ended in pink, delicate wrists. Despite his brawn there was something of the intellectual about him; a low-sitting pair of wire-rimmed glasses obscured his pupils, giving him an almost affected erudition. His speech seemed deliberately unadorned, as though he were used to giving others time to catch up with his ideas.

“Call the Guinness Book —we made it here in less than a month,” laughed the man.

His wife glanced at him, then tapped the glass at Samuel’s eye level, so that he was obliged to take a backward step. He opened the storm door.

“Raymond Frank,” said the man, fingering the lid of a silver lighter in his fist. He gestured to his wife. “Eudora and Ray Frank. As second to the mayor on Aster’s town council, I’d like to welcome you to the town. We thought we’d come and get a good look at you.” Laughing, he thrust his substantial hand into Samuel’s, all the while winking at his wife. “So far so good, eh?”

“Don’t badger the poor man,” said Eudora with a straight face, though Samuel sensed an undercurrent of comedy between them. “Will you look at this house?” Eudora glanced past Samuel, then brought her piercing eyes to rest on him. She shoved a foil-covered dish at him.

Eudora was a feminist, though her resulting behaviour was more questionable than when she simply called herself a woman. She agreed with a woman’s right to vote, but believed this the extent to which women should be involved in politics. She maintained that all women should have access to higher education, but if pressed enough she would admit it was unnatural. She believed that a marriage without children was no more than a pact between a rake and a hussy, yet she herself was barren. She was vice-president of Aster’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Women (NAAW), and yet she knew a woman’s true duty was to her home. As a laywoman, she volunteered in homes for the mentally handicapped, helped to found Aster’s first soup kitchen and could be persuaded on occasion to make one of her devastating custards for a good cause. At the helm of NAAW she wrote petitions to the municipalities of Calgary, Edmonton and even Aster to establish a special education course so that the “poor challenged dears” would be prevented from “compromising normal students.” She proved herself a woman before her time by suggesting social awareness programs to crack down on prenatal alcoholism; but her reasons? — to stop filling cradles with “feeble-minded babies.” In her crusader state of mind, the motives differed.

“Thank you kindly,” said Samuel, taking the dish.

“It’s a desert,” she said, “but don’t worry, I took out all the sand. No, really, it’s a dessert torte, and by the dinner sounds in there I’d say our timing’s just right.” She looked beyond his shoulder.

“We have almost finished.” Samuel smiled; a few seconds passed before her hint occurred to him. “Oh, will you not come and meet my family?”

The Franks shared a laugh between them, and Samuel stared, unable to discern the joke. Eudora reached for the pan in his hands and said, “I’ll do the cutting.”

In the kitchen, the meal had come to an end. Today, as on other occasions, Samuel noticed that the twins seemed to distrust their food in front of strangers. They set down their forks. Samuel laughed to distract attention from them and gestured to Maud, who, startled at the sudden company, tried to swallow as quickly as possible with a shy smile on her face. Before she could say anything, Eudora leaned between Ama and Yvette, as though her presence were the most natural thing in the world, and dropped the dessert in the centre of the table.

Taking a backward step, she glanced at their plates. “Poor dears. Been cleaning so hard you haven’t had a chance to go shopping. We’ll take you, when you’re ready.”

In a look so quick Eudora might have missed it, Maud expressed her annoyance. “Don’t trouble yourselves.” Remembering herself, she wiped her hands on her thighs and rose to shake hands. “Whatever you’ve brought smells delicious. We’re grateful for dessert when we can get it.” She breathed a laugh. “It doesn’t happen much around here.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Eudora, looking from Ray to the ceiling draped in dust bunnies. Perplexed, Samuel and Maud watched Eudora begin to sort through their drawers. “Can’t use that,” she muttered to herself. “Or that.” Maud glared at Samuel. When Eudora commented that they “obviously haven’t done the drawers yet,” Samuel thought Maud would implode with exasperation. Feeling that he should do something, Samuel appealed to Ray with his eyes to put an end to his wife’s prying. The children sat paralyzed in their chairs, unwilling to raise their heads.

Ray looked blithely around him, oblivious. He only came alive when his wife glanced at him; then he laughed, and in a meaningless, childlike way.

Samuel was in awe. Here was a man thriving in his wife’s shadow.

“Dora,” Ray finally said, “get out of there.”

“Coming, coming,” she said, clearly disappointed with the knife she was obliged to take away with her. Skinning the foil from the dish, she leaned over a scowling Chloe to cut the fruit torte. Her eyes skimmed their plates again. “Ray’s allergic to beets.”

Here, at last, Samuel found a way into the conversation. “Codeine,” he declared, then, clearing his throat at the general puzzlement, added, “codeine is my Achilles heel.”