Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

When the pregnancy assailed them, Maud had already reached thirty-one, a distasteful age for a first child, both by Gold Coast and Western standards of the time. Her failure as a nanny also haunted her. So it devastated her when not one, but two babies arrived, and not even boys at that. Twins. Both Samuel and Maud were embarrassed to admit that not even an ocean could distance them from their superstitions. For twins were a kind of misfortune. Samuel’s great uncles had been twins, and the advent of their birth had brought a maelstrom of controversy to the family. Primogeniture had been jeopardized — without knowing for certain who’d been born first, how could they name an heir? And twins, a freak occurrence, scared people. Only some awful wrongdoing could produce the same person twice. The mother’s fidelity came into question; for no man on earth was so virile that he could do two at once. Only the prestige of the Tyne name saved their matriarch from suspicion. Samuel’s ancestral experience was enough to put both him and Maud off.

On the seventh day they named their children. The first-born was called Yvette, a name neither fully liked, a sullen compromise between Efua and Betty. The second-born Maud named Chloe, because she liked its European appeal. Wearied by the argument, Samuel allowed her names, though it took days of nagging for him to refer to his girls as anything but them . Even Annalia seemed more inventive to him. But Samuel, always a quick healer, recovered from his defeat as scarlessly as if he’d picked the names himself.

Maud was surprised at how easy it was to love the babies. She realized the ingredient lacking in her stint as a nanny was that the children had to be her own. Their stupidest behaviour amused her, even their volatile eating patterns, which exhausted her with their inconstancy. But she was smitten. At their third birthday party, Maud’s tea circle gathered to marvel at the cold concertos whistled with the sincerity of a flute. Two years later, the girls took to calling themselves Dracula (Yvette) and Ms. Diefenbachia (Chloe), which in the company of others became the single identity Ms. Diefendracula, or more simply, Drachia. Samuel saw this as a clever allusion to the Diefenbaker government, and took pride in knowing the Tyne wit would not die out with him. By age seven they amazed Maud by performing Shakespeare, though still in the habit of sucking each other’s thumbs. At nine, Maud caught them playing the Same Game, repeating each other’s gestures like a delayed mirror, speaking pig Latin with the dexterity of a first language. Chloe even had such a strange magnetic makeup that watches ran backwards on her wrist. Now, at twelve, they’d begun to pattern their own poetry after Lord Byron’s. Genius, Maud liked to say, was obvious.

When their childish games degenerated into fights, Maud consoled herself that after the first outburst things would pass. One day Chloe chose the wrong outfit (for they dressed alike and despised looking like others), and Yvette boxed her ears. This was followed by Yvette’s disastrous attempt to steal candy from Maud’s nightstand: she and Chloe stuffed their mouths with the dried liniment balls used to soften Samuel’s baths. After throwing up in the neighbour’s flowerbeds, Chloe punched her sister, screaming, “You poi soned me!” Then came the day Chloe refused to answer to anything but Diefenbachia (retaliation: a kick in the leg); the day Yvette refused to whistle the sugar-beet song that would prolong Chloe’s life by five minutes (retaliation: a dime-sized patch of baldness); the day Chloe ate Yvette’s cassava (retaliation: a cherry pit hidden at the heart of Chloe’s ice-cream dish, chipping her molar and, so she claimed, plaguing her with a lifetime of insensate tastebuds). The only time Maud intervened was when she caught them doing synchronized backflips off the roof, landing like rag dolls in the juniper. Yvette cried a single, isolated tear, while Chloe seemed invigorated by the fall, so that Samuel, seeing them unharmed, nicknamed them Young Tragedy and Comedy.

The day after Samuel’s doll fiasco, Maud found the twins in the kitchen eating graham crackers and laughing. They lowered their voices when she entered.

“What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs, floating in a pool?” said Chloe.

“Bob!” said Yvette. “What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs, stretched out on a porch?”

“Matt!” said Chloe. “What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs—”

“Yvette and Chloe, that is un-Christian and you will stop telling those jokes this instant,” said Maud. She looked in dismay from one face to the other. Last year she’d had a meeting with the twins’ school guidance counsellor. The encounter had been less than pleasant. In the counsellor’s tidy, moist office, Maud had sat in a child’s chair as a harassed, large-boned woman lectured her on the ills of her children from the vantage of her oak desk. It was not that the twins were poor students, the woman explained, but they were rude and insolent, and sometimes defied authority by falling completely silent. Painful as this was to Maud, she was fully prepared to comply with any of the school’s solutions until the counsellor spoke again: “And their speech is pretty sluggish, not very clear. Though I suppose we’re just not used to the accent.”

Maud set her jaw. “The twins were born here. In Canada.”

The woman raised her eyebrows in surprise, but made no further comments. Throughout her speech, Maud couldn’t help but feel the whole thing was some subtly racist attempt to discredit her daughters. Promising nothing, Maud got up and left, telling neither Samuel nor the twins about the meeting.

Samuel sat in the shed. It was a cold, vague day, with the dull feel of a hundred others, but for a time Samuel let himself be consoled by it. The weather seemed complicit with his mood. He pressed his feet to the electric heater under his workbench, rubbing his hands together.

Something was bothering him, but he could not say exactly what. Three days had passed since he’d walked off his job, and he’d so far managed to keep his secret from Maud, who spent most of her days immersed in cleaning or shopping in town. He cracked open the wooden case of a radio and fiddled with its innards in a distracted, unskilled way. His workbench touched two walls of the tiny shed, and was riddled with wires. Forced to be fastidiously tidy at the government office, Samuel often let his shed get messy. Drops of solder speckled the bench, and the dust he roused each time he moved gave him a vague pleasure. Despite this, he still felt painfully preoccupied. It surprised him that he could be unhappy in his new freedom.

Samuel’s hackles rose when he heard the shed door’s hinges rattling. He turned to see Yvette standing in the doorway, dwarfed in her mother’s wool sweater. Her thin, chapped knees peeked overtop a pair of his own rain boots. With her serious face, she looked like an old woman who’d shrunk. She let in the dry, metallic smell of winter.

Samuel singed his knuckle on the soldering iron. Flinching and tensing his fist, he tried to smile.

“What are you doing home from school?” he said after a moment.

“What are you doing home from work?”

The girl had always been bold, but not in any admirable way. Samuel shrugged and half rose from his bench, sitting abruptly when the gesture struck him as silly. He was terribly nervous. He cleared his throat. “Well, well,” he said, as though delighted to have company. “Well, well.”

Yvette kicked aside his clutter of paint cans, stripped wires, burnt fuses, soiled newspapers, rousing the smell of kerosene. She sat decisively on the floor and looked at him. Samuel hesitated, turning away when he discovered she had nothing to say. Finally, as though bored that her silence didn’t bother him, she cocked her head to one side and said, “I woke up sick, and the thought of going to school only made me sicker.”