Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

He was so reminded of his daughters that he knew at once the dolls were good luck. “Give me those!” he said, forgetting to talk down the price. Driving home, he knew he’d made a mistake. The dolls sat like livid children in the back seat, and Samuel couldn’t help but glance at them in his rear-view mirror. Their sharp red hair looked like rooster combs, and they had the lush, vulgar mouths of prostitutes. The stitching around their eyes was done so childishly that Samuel wondered if the Greek hadn’t made them himself. He parked in an alley five houses away, then strode to the shed to throw the dolls in the ashcan. But some vulnerability about them, inanimate though they were, made him stuff them high on a shelf instead. Sitting down to the wires of Maud’s prized clock, Samuel thought of his job, and of the inherited house in Aster. Maud knew nothing of either.

When the time came to fake his punctual return from work, Samuel found himself in such a good mood that, like all men who wake from the graveyard of an empty life, he assumed his joy was universal. Taking the dolls down from the shelf, he put them in his briefcase, which he walked into the humid kitchen swinging like the happy apparition of the boy he’d been.

Maud looked at him with suspicion. “Look who’s won the lottery,” she said. “Supper will be ready in ten minutes. Sit down.”

He sat across from the twins, whose rigid unresponsiveness to his smiles hurt his mood a little. He thought of presenting his gift right then, but restrained himself to wait until after dinner. He ate a lukewarm spinach stew with sweet fried plantain, and watching the twins, with their oblong faces leaning over their plates as though the whole of their fates could be found there, Samuel recalled their infancy, when they’d refused to eat in a sensible way. No sooner was baby Yvette fasting than baby Chloe grew gluttonous. The next day, with Yvette greedy from the previous day’s starvation, there was barely enough time to clean up what Chloe threw up. It was maddening. Their erratic eating patterns had left Maud feeling lost. Helpless, Samuel could only console his wife.

Now his daughters ate by rote, chewing as though they resented meals for the time they had to spend in their parents’ company. Maud asked them probing questions about school, and keeping her eyes on her plate Yvette barely raised her voice for the one-word answers. Samuel was discouraged. But, nevertheless, when the meal ended, he pulled his briefcase onto the table and, delighted with himself, presented the dolls.

Neither girl moved. Then, raising their heads, they looked in Samuel’s direction with sharp eyes, more in assessment of him than of his gift.

Samuel cleared his throat. “They’re rag dolls. Thought you girls might like them.” He eyed Maud, who deliberately didn’t look his way. Her face was a confusion of feelings; unnerved by her twins, she nevertheless felt vindicated. Samuel was just as useless a parent as she was.

Chloe wouldn’t look at the dolls. Under her sister’s direction, Yvette gave them a quick appraisal and signalled with her eyes that the dolls were not worth the pain of talking to their father. Or so things seemed to Samuel, who was more perplexed than hurt by their behaviour.

“You could thank him,” said Maud.

Chloe fixated on her plate.

Yvette raised her dark-lined, almond eyes, and in her mocking falsetto, she said, “Thank you.”

The table fell silent. The longer no one said anything, the more embittered Samuel became. He left the table without speaking but not before noticing that the twins had grasped each other’s hands beneath the table. He went out to the shed.

But thoughts of the house he now owned, and of the easy way he’d abandoned his job, made him feel less rejected. He even smiled at the twins’ precocity. They had a special knack for making Samuel feel like a hopeless child.

But then, the twins had always been brilliant.

Years before, during the first devil’s rainstorm of August, Maud Tyne turned from the rain at the window when she heard a baby say, “You don’t have to name me. I am Annalia.”

Maud felt a shadow pass over her. The voice was so precisely what one would expect of a six-day-old, if six-day-olds spoke, that it resounded like a bell. Maud scanned the spare room, its gaggle of toys clogging one corner, a tall Roman lamp with a jaunty orange shade, the blue table sagging with almost human exhaustion. Nothing. Not even a talking doll to take the blame. Maud glanced at the twins in their shared bassinet by the closet and, annoyed at her fear, strode over to draw back the blanket.

The girls were moist and sluggish, so that disturbing them felt like a kind of violation. The girl on the left yawned, and the yawn passed to the mouth of her sleeping sister, who shuddered. Within seconds they both dozed, and Maud walked back to the window. There had been no miracle. But instead of relief, Maud felt even more disturbed.

Outside, people rushed through the downpour, a sharp sun giving the light the quality of an eclipse. But Maud looked without truly seeing, so distracted that the sound of the doorbell startled her. She’d forgotten. She had been waiting since two o’clock for a day of tea and prophetic gossip with Ella Bjornson, now more than an hour late. Maud checked again on the sleeping twins, then descended the stairs.

Ella was soaked to the bone, her green bonnet flattened against her scalp. She was an usher at the church, who counselled what she called “the wretched, disconsolate products of thoughtless love,” namely the children of mixed marriages. Ella herself had married a gentle Scandinavian, the father of her two well-adjusted children. But she balked at that fact, saying it was only by chance they had turned out so splendid, and shattering her confidentiality oath, would list the names of twenty children who had not.

An expert gossip, Ella got her information by feigning sympathy, so that Maud always weighed her words during their conversations. And yet, despite Ella’s ruthlessness, people still invited her for tea and entrusted her with their children, for she had a politician’s charms.

“The hail alone out there will give you a concussion,” said Ella. “Maud, what’s wrong? You really look in pain.” She shrugged out of her drenched overcoat and wrapped her arms around Maud. “Tell Ella.”

Maud shrugged. “How about you, Ella? How are you doing?”

And it was as though Maud had flipped a switch, for forgetting Maud entirely — that was another of Ella’s quirks, that she had the attention span of the children she counselled — she began to criticize the Pratts, who made daytime love without the good sense to close the door. “Imagine a child seeing that,” said Ella. “The damage!”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” said Maud, leading Ella through the hall into a sombre room in which the teaset sat pre-arranged like a chessboard. The storm light gave the furniture the dark quality of ruins, and a smell of mud and ferment saturated everything. Maud shut the windows and motioned Ella to the closest chair, which her friend collapsed into with a fanfare of sighs and rustling. Maud slid the rum from the bookshelf.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your generosity,” said Ella. “How are the twins? I’ve been dying to see them.”

Without so much as a pause, Maud topped their toddies with a few drops of tea, though her pulse quickened. “It is easier to raise the dead than to get two bad-tempered babies back to sleep. Next time.”

Ella so easily accepted Maud’s authority that Maud wondered why she didn’t try to be stern more often. She might have saved herself three years of humiliations. Not that Ella dared gossip about Maud (or so Maud hoped), but too often Maud found herself Ella’s unwitting accomplice and, lacking the ingenuity to extricate herself, ended up shouldering the blame for slandering good people. When Ella had repeated to anyone with ears that old man Davis was a licentious cross-dresser, and that his wife’s holidays were actually electroshock treatments in Ponoka, Maud, least interested and last to hear it, got caught bringing it up as known news at a church social. The Davises now despised the Tynes, refusing to invite them to their Christmas parties. Ella, on the other hand, still received her invitations yearly.