'The Enigma Twins', by Paul Illidge
One summer afternoon I was sitting on a chaise-longue in our backyard, which backed onto Paradise Gardens Cemetery, reading “The Twenty-One Balloons” by William Pène Dubois.
“—Professor Sherman trying to cross the Pacific in a balloon but he crashes,” a boy’s voice called to me over the back fence, “after a seagull pokes a hole in it and he lands on the island of Krakatoa in the South Pacific. A volcano blows up the island, but the inhabitants float away on a raft held aloft by twenty-one balloons. I’ve read it!” he finished by saying, quickly adding, “My name’s Teddy. What’s yours?” I told him, closed the book and stood up to get a closer look at him.
About my age, tall, a friendly smile, he opened the gate, stepped into the yard, walked up to me holding out his hand. We shook. He waited a minute while I surveyed what he was wearing: a girl’s sleeveless pink blouse, matching shorts, pink girls’ running shoes with white ankle socks, his/her long blond hair held in a pony tail by a pink barrette.
“Don’t worry,” he said with a reassuring smile. “I’m a boy, but sometimes I like to dress in girls’ clothes because they’re more fun. Do you have any sisters?”
“Just a brother.”
“You like the book?”
“So far.”
“Sorry if I spoiled the plot.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Would you like to be friends?”
“Sure,” I said, put out my hand and we shook again. “Where do you live?”
“Up the street and around the corner.”
“What grade will you be in when school starts?”
“Four. I’m nine,” he said, adding “I’m tall for my age.”
“Same as me.”
“You want to walk around the cemetery?”
“Sure.”
Off we went, and in that hour of walking through the cemetery together we became fast friends . . .
At school come September, our teacher Mrs. Lehtinen, young, pretty, easier going than most other teachers, told Teddy he was precocious, and a dawdler, about to explain what this meant when he answered that he knew what both words meant. Teachers in the past had said the same thing about him. Teddy explained that he found schoolwork easy, something that he couldn’t really help because he read a lot, and learned things that weren’t taught in school. As to being a dawdler, he admitted his guilt, but defended himself by saying a psychologist at his previous school had called him that, telling him he was distractible, got easily sidetracked and took too much time to do things. He claimed in his defence this only happened when he was interested in something. He couldn’t help it if he found lots of things interesting. He was naturally curious. Was that such a bad thing?
Mrs. Lehtinen, a patient teacher who nonetheless would call him out when she felt he was using his precocity and dawdling to take advantage of situations which other students in the class couldn’t, would sometimes send him with his work to a book storeroom where he would have to work alone for an hour or sometimes two. Teddy would complete the work in half an hour or so, then begin reading books for the rest of his time out.
Teddy lived next door to the Cannon family: three girls, Robin, Cassandra (Cassie) and Dorothy (Dottie), aged eleven, nine and seven, all of whom were enamoured of Teddy from the moment he moved in. When they found out that he didn’t mind, they would dress him up in Robin’s and Cassie’s clothes for fun, letting him wear outfits and jewellery he liked to school. Cassie, tall and thin, very fashionable in her tastes, was in our class. She and some of her friends would stand close to Teddy in the morning line-up at the doors so that when the bell rang they could stay close to him so he wouldn’t be noticed by teachers on the way in.
Mrs. Lehtinen played along until the national anthem was finished, waited until the class started giggling thinking Mrs. Lehtinen hadn’t noticed, but of course she had. Announcing the fun was over, she would point to the door and tell Teddy to head home and change into his own clothes (she knew he was getting his outfits from the Cannon sisters because she’d seen them wearing the same ones), calling upon me to accompany him (Teddy’s parents both worked, Mrs. Lehtinen considered me reliable and a strong student so I could afford to miss the time). We were usually back within thirty minutes, time that Teddy had to make up after school sitting quietly and still with his hands on his desk, the worst punishment of all for someone like Teddy who, along with his other behavioural issues, suffered from hyperactive disorder. Sitting still was torture for him. As much as Mrs. Lehtinen said she disliked this approach, still it was preferable to the approach our principal Mr. Moore, an older, curmudgeonly man with a gruff personality would have taken. Teddy acquiesced without complaint.
These clothing stunts were a source of fun around the school for everyone except Carl “Smitty” Smith, Bobby “Jumbo” Clough, and Dennis “Mick” McGuire, two years older, sixth grade boys who smoked, swore, beat up people they didn’t like, not just boys, after school. Teddy became one of their main targets. Calling him faggot, gearbox, homo, and other obscene words, they demanded he pay them ransom money or they’d beat the shit out of him. Teddy refused to pay. The beatings were sometimes severe. They took place off school property so that even if we had reported them, there was nothing Mrs. Lehtinen or the school could do.
I would help Teddy walk home and clean him up before his parents came home from work. He never complained, never admitted his pain, only spoke quietly as if to himself: Their day will come.
The beatings continued off and on for several months until one day Teddy said that enough was enough, their day had come. He had devised a plan that would make them think twice about ever laying a finger on anyone again.
We waited until one day after lunch when we were playing in the school yard and Smitty came up to us, but before he could inform Teddy that it was time for another beating, I stepped up to Smitty and told him Teddy was the one who would be giving the beating that day, one they’d never forget. He and the others should meet us in the cemetery near the old oak tree with the historical plaque beside it. Four o’clock, I said. We’ll meet you there.
Smitty just scoffed, shoved me away, walked back to his bully buddies, told them what the other queer had said, which prompted the three of them to laugh as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
Shortly before four o’clock I used an eight-foot aluminum stepladder that I’d brought with me, climbed up and nailed a yellow, red, blue, black and white circular target to the west-facing side of the old oak tree trunk. Climbing down, I folded up the ladder and carried it, the hammer and nails, into the woods about twenty feet away from the oak tree.
In about five minutes I saw Smitty, Jumbo and Mick approaching on the cemetery road, laughing and kibitzing like they were getting ready to have some fun. They spotted me, left the road and headed up the grass incline to the oak tree. I told them Teddy would be there any minute, why didn’t they just stand up against the tree and Teddy would choose who to fight first. They howled at that. I told them again to stand up against the tree and, if they knew what was good for them, not to move. I don’t think they had noticed the target above them on the tree.
Less than a minute after they’d settled down, there was a short, fast whizzing sound and an arrow went thung! into the tree bark no more than a foot above Smitty’s head. Several seconds later a second whizzing arrow went thung! into the bark over Jumbo’s head, and seconds after that a third whizzing arrow went thung! into the bark over Mick’s head.
The three of them stood there, terrified.
I pointed to the woods about twenty yards away on the other side of the cemetery road. Teddy had stepped into view with a professional-looking bow into which he was stringing another arrow.
“He won’t miss this time,” was all I had to say and the three of them were tearing off along the cemetery road back the way they had come.
I smiled and waved to Teddy. He smiled and waved back to me. For two years running he had been the provincial under-12 target shooting champion.
There were no more beatings.
After that he never wore girls’ clothes again. He never told me why, and I never asked. He made an effort in Mrs. Lehtinen’s class not to be precocious, and he stopped being a dawdler.
Every other Saturday morning Teddy came to the library with my father and me. We found novels and biographies of famous people, books on strange and unusual topics. At home in his bedroom or mine, we’d take turns reading aloud while the other person looked up meanings of words in an Oxford dictionary we had pooled our allowances and bought.
We read science fiction and fantasy stories in magazines, our favourite called GALAXIE. We began writing our own stories with what we thought of as fascinating characters and what we thought of as incredible plots. Sometimes Mrs. Lehtinen allowed us to read them to the class. There was always applause, which didn’t mean as much to Teddy and me as people asking “What comes next?”
Teddy liked to come to my house after school some days at four-o’clock and listen to me practice the piano. He sat on the chesterfield with his eyes closed, hands folded on his lap, listening intently, a placid smile on his face for most of the hour. My mother would often invite him to stay for supper since his parents sometimes wouldn’t get home from work until 6:30.
One time, my brother Adam asked Teddy why he had white skin, blue eyes and blond hair when his parents had dark eyes, black hair and slightly brown skin.
Apologizing for Adam’s rudeness, my mother sent him to his room without any dinner, my mother’s final word that it was none of Adam’s or anyone else’s business.
I went to summer camp that July, then to the family cottage for the month of August. Teddy and I wrote letters in which we talked about books we were reading, ideas we had for new stories to write when I came home, how much he was learning at archery camp in preparation for the national championships in late September.
In an early August letter he shared a secret that I had to keep confidential: he and Robin, eldest of the Cannon sisters, who had turned twelve, were in love, sneaking off to the cemetery nearly every day where they walked holding hands, went into the woods and kissed. Robin, being older, knew more about kissing and about SEX, and was teaching him. Teddy promised to give me full details when I came home.
As things turned out, the secret would have to wait. We went back to school the day after Labour Day. My 9th birthday party took place the following Saturday in Kew Beach Park next to the boardwalk beside Lake Ontario. Teddy left the picnic table to go down the hill to the public washroom beside the boardwalk, never to be seen again.
A letter came for me in late October twenty-eight years later, just before Halloween, no return address:
“As you will understand when you read this, I have to watch my words. The people holding me have told me any funny business will not be tolerated. What’s funny about any of this? I asked them, only to receive a smack in the face and a threat to take the pen and paper away from me. I’ve promised to behave myself and fully cooperate.
“At this point they have no idea who I am, no idea what my connection is with you, but I think they’re getting more suspicious every minute. They tried extracting information from me with threats of more smacks, or worse. I told them there was simply nothing to extract with or without smacks, except that you and I had been good friends a long time ago. After close to twenty-eight years I wanted to return to the city and reintroduce myself to you, apologize for the fact it had taken me so long to get up the nerve to do so after what was, at the time, as painful and frightening a parting for me as I know it must have been for you with me simply disappearing from your life.”
“Do you remember, Aaron, how we used to argue about white and black being colours? You insisting they were, while I maintained they were not? I forget how in our young and naive way we each came up with proofs to defend our position (none of which I remember now!)
“In the end I believe we agreed to disagree, but what fun we had. I mention the black versus white dispute as a clue to why you should trust me when I plead with you to give these fellows what they want, whatever it is, remembering what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories we read: ‘MEMORY is the gateway to understanding’.
“How could I forget Sherlock Holmes, Aaron, the master of clues! Or the stories we read in the science fiction magazine GALAXIE. You must remember them: Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison? We even wrote up our own story “THE ENIGMA TWINS” at one point. About the two friends who talked in a code language they invented which only they could understand? It wasn’t corny like something in pig Latin. Our word codes were enigmas to everyone else. The story details were in regular English, but the dialogue between the two friends JERICHO EVANS and MITCH DEL REY was in code words. As well, any time we didn’t want our parents or friends to know what we were talking about, we spoke in code.
“One last thing before I run out of paper (they have only given me the one sheet), I remember when you told me your mother had tried to kill herself, that as sad and terrifying as it was to see her dying in front of you as she was, you couldn’t cry. You said you’d never learned how to cry. I said as far as I knew it wasn’t something that could be taught. It had to do with your emotions. ‘Could you teach me, Teddy?’ you asked me. I said I would give it a try.
“You came over to my house and while we were talking about it, my mother overheard us. A nurse as of course you knew, she sat us down and explained that the incident with your mother’s attempted suicide had sent you into deep shock, and also left you traumatized with guilt, feeling, as the eldest child, that it was somehow your fault. And to everyone in the aftermath it appeared as if you had no feelings at all when you didn’t shed a single tear, at least that anyone saw.
“That simply wasn’t true, my mother explained. ‘You were overwhelmed’, she said. ‘But one day, and there’s no telling when, you’ll wake up like it’s an ordinary day. But it won’t be, Aaron. The guilt will simply be gone.’
“When they release me, Aaron, I promise I’ll reappear in your life as soon as I can and explain everything, including what became of me in the months and years that followed, hoping, though I don’t deserve it, that you might see your way to forgiving me after what I know will have been an unendurable silence for you.
“All my love, Teddy Villanova.”
Paul ILLIDGE has an M.A. in English Language & Literature from the University of Toronto.
He has been a novelist, short story writer, memoirist, screenwrter, ghostwriter and professional nonfiction writer since 2001, publishing books for clients, some for trade, on theatre (THE GLASS CAGE), architecture (BEYOND THE FOUNTAINHEAD), law (THE LUNATIC AND THE LORDS), the pharmaceutical industry (CAN YOU GIVE ME SOMETHING FOR THAT?) and the 21ST century Internet (THE PAGE, THE STAGE, THE DIGITAL AGE).
Evelyn de Morgan - Phosphorus and Hesperus, 1881