Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

The twins rose with feigned drowsiness, blinking their eyes. “Mrs. Tyne,” Yvette said with false awe, “you woke us.”

“Where’s Ama?”

Chloe gave Yvette an indistinct message with her eyes.

“What are you doing with your eyes?” said Maud, and Chloe dropped back down in bed.

“Ama’s in the bathroom,” said Yvette. “I don’t know if her bladder’s weak, or if she does time travel through the toilet, but you never saw a girl who was better friends with plumbing.”

Maud was astonished. “How dare you be so rude?” She slapped off the lights and, turning to leave, heard:

“Call us Annalia.”

Maud felt a shadow pass over her. She flipped on the lights. “Which one of you said that?”

The twins looked at her with startled eyes, but Maud suspected they were holding back laughter. She stared them down a good minute, and when neither relented, she threatened them with what the morning would bring and slammed the door behind her. Agitated, Maud moved towards the bathroom in a kind of stupor. She was more mystified than angry, not only because they had (again?) called themselves Annalia, but because until now they had never dared defy her authority. More startling was the vicious energy behind what they’d said, as though they’d planned the slight earlier and had spent these last hours savouring the outcome.

In the bathroom, the plumbing made trickling noises in the wall. Maud turned on the light, a naked bulb blistered with dead flies that, heated, gave off a burnt cork smell. Maud’s search for Ama quickly became ridiculous. A perplexed onlooker might have thought she was looking for a cat, for no nook went unscoured. In truth, she was driven by her own need to believe her children, and only after she pulled from behind the radiator a pair of glasses blind with rust did she admit that the girl might not be there.

She grew uneasy. And yet, whether because the wine still clouded her thoughts or because fear was really very foreign to her, her unease, impossibly, vanished. With her usual stern poise, she walked to the landing and called Samuel’s name. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs looking sleepy.

“I hate to wake you,” she said, “but our third cadet’s gone AWOL, and the twins aren’t talking.”

Samuel dismissed Maud with his hand. “Children’s mischief.”

Maud adorned each hip with a fist. “That is the second time today you’ve abused me. You just stay there and stand your lifetime away, and when I have to call in the authorities to find her you’ll know what kind of man you are.”

Samuel began the stairs. “Have you spoken with the twins?”

“I tried, but for children of an unlistening father it makes sense they’re not talking.” Maud looked as if she blamed him. And he recognized then that he was tired in ways he’d always seen as weaknesses in other men; disappointed that even he could find himself out of love with his wife.

Together, they confronted the twins. Maud approached the nearest bed, where Yvette sat looking indifferent.

“Where’s Ama?”

“We don’t know,” said Chloe.

“I didn’t ask you . Yvette, where’s Ama?”

Chloe nodded to a pile of clothes in the corner.

“What, is she hiding under there?” said Maud with a pang of conscience. She hated to think she might have accused her children of mischief they were perhaps not responsible for. As she walked to the wall to sort through the colourful clothes, Yvette said:

“She only said she was going to the toilet.”

“Eh, eh, enough.” Samuel sucked his teeth. Sitting on Ama’s cot, he said, “No more tomfoolery. I want a report of your every action this evening.” He noticed the twins glancing at each other before either answered. Samuel almost couldn’t contain his temper in the face of this brazen behaviour, which gave him the feeling of being a peon in a ruthless childhood game. Neither seemed able to speak without the brief communion.

“What is wrong with your eyes?” he demanded.

Maud placed a hand on his arm, as if to say this was her jurisdiction. “So this is what we get for trusting you? We’d have done better to chain you to your beds.”

Neither twin spoke, but Yvette lowered her eyes.

Young Tragedy and Comedy , thought Samuel, but he felt none of the warmth the nickname usually gave him. Crushing his bowler in his hands, he stood into a stretch. His voice was tired. “I will begin with the cellar and then ascend. If I discover nothing, then I will comb through every blade of grass. If I discover nothing, I will search all of Aster. And if I still discover nothing”—he pushed his wilted hat into place—“I will search the world.”

They all three looked at him curiously. Maud scoffed and shook her head. “Don’t get lost yourself.”

Samuel hadn’t intended to make such an august speech, or any speech at all for that matter, but he’d wanted to end the conversation. Besides, his agitation, and his inability to master it, left Samuel prone to absurd outbursts. He slunk to the cellar where, hanging his dinner coat on a rusty, white-tipped nail, he began what he already suspected would be a fruitless search. He wondered, not without guilt, why affection for Ama came so much more easily to him than it ever had for his twins, who displayed all the natural brilliance and mischief he’d so wanted in a child. He felt a sort of embittered pity towards them, and reproved himself for it.

The cellar’s darkness calmed Samuel. Roots and moss thrived in the cracks where the caulking had aged loose, and soggy documents wilted from their piles to the floor, tricking the eye into seeing thatched tile. Had the air not been so musty Samuel might have felt at home. Instead, he sensed a broken pipe somewhere and made a mental note to call a professional in the morning. As he pried through the clutter, calling out Ama’s name, he was struck by the uselessness of man in the face of adversity. He granted that a person’s most-feared enemy, what stalks each life, is death, and that there isn’t a man yet who has managed to outwit it. For this reason, men pretended to be at the helm of their lives, but they weren’t, and could only feign navigation on a river predetermined for them.

Samuel wrestled these thoughts through the cellar, through the kitchen with its insistent flies, through the room where Jacob had strewn cane mats for his morning prayers, through the hall closet with its smell of smoke, through the living room with its spiteful fireplace that gasped ashes in Samuel’s face when he passed it. Man cannot master death, he thought. Not even Jacob Tyne. Jacob of the Harsh Mouth and Stern Fist. Our Saint of Clandestine Sorrow. Samuel felt a kind of remorse for the man he could not mourn. Jacob had been as severe and distant as he’d been anxious to give his nephew a better life. Samuel didn’t understand the man, and, as ever, was perplexed by what he was expected to feel for him. In a lot of ways Jacob wasn’t worth the brooding, had been a millstone on Samuel’s back, remembered only for the little cruelties, each drawn-out act of kindness more like a punishment. Jacob had cared for him with an undisguised sense of obligation. Samuel had never learned the true cause of his uncle’s debt, and how can you mourn a man you don’t know? What was left but to bury and forget him? Why hold the forty days’ ceremony — what was the point in pouring libation so far from the country in which that act meant something, and with a crowd of stragglers unknown to the dead? What was the point in being the only person who could keep the deceased alive by remembering him if that person had not given you a shred of himself to be remembered by? There was no point. Let the dead bury their dead.

Samuel completed his search of the main floor without success. He had that drenched feeling only tiredness of mind can provoke, and wanted to finish his search as soon as possible to sooner call the authorities. Thinking of Ama suffering somewhere made him nervous, so he thought of other things. As he trudged through the girls’ Iron Lung, a favourite obscurity occurred to him: all of life’s ambitions were mere diversions. Politicians sought refuge in conflicts, the immoral sought it in sex, and many men just worked until they dropped. You did everything to keep yourself from seeing the futility of it. But Samuel had joined that class of men who, having attained a major goal, suddenly see the vanity in wanting it.