Hilda's blessing came in the form of her blue-eyed, towheaded boy whose feet she hardly let touch the ground, even when he was old enough to walk.
The little boy's ayah, Sebestie, had nothing to do other than join in the play since it was Hilda who let him ride on her back pretending he was Jim Corbett, the big-game hunter, and she the elephant carrying him to the tiger blind. Hilda drew red-chalk wickets on the whitewashed walls and bowled to him with a tennis ball. She sang hymns to him, and fanned him when it was too humid to fall asleep. The bell-like clarity of her voice caused somnolent lizards on the wall to snap to attention. Her brown hair, parted in the center, fell from a steepled head. Regardless of how she restrained it, a frizzy halo framed her face.
In the middle of the night he reached for her and she was there. But on the nights Justifus Stone was home, the little boy slept poorly, fearful for his mother because those were the only times she left his bed. He kept vigil with his cricket bat outside the closed bedroom door, prepared to break in if the noises did not subside. They always did and only then would he retreat to his room. In the morning, when he opened his eyes, she would be back in his bed, awake and peering out through her fringe of hair.
Every child should have a mother of such even temperament, her rare displeasure evidenced so gently that the effect was lasting. Thomas lived to please his mother and he was earnest in his pleasing. It was as if they both knew, though they could not have known, that life was short, the moment fleeting.
HE WAS EIGHT when Hilda had to excuse herself from the St. Mary's choir. A cough that at first was like distant artillery soon sounded like nails rattling in a paper bag. Dr. Winthrop, an overdressed man who did not converse as much as make pronouncements, said mother and son were to sleep apart, “for the child's betterment.”
The little boy heard her nightly paroxysms from the other room and covered his ears with the pillows. “Undoubtedly consumption,” Dr. Winthrop said to Thomas one day, using a delicate word for tuberculosis as he put away his stethoscope and thermometer. “It has turned dry. The sicca form of phthisis, you know.” He talked to the little boy as if to a colleague and shook his hand with gravity. When would she get better? “Rest and diet and hydrotherapy,” said the doctor. “Some of the time— let's say, much of the time—it becomes quiescent. After all, it's not up to us, is it, Master Stone?” When Thomas asked, Please, sir, whom might it be up to, Winthrop raised his eyes to the ceiling. It was only later that the little boy understood the doctor did not mean Justifus, whose heavy tread shook the chandelier. He meant God.
One morning Thomas awoke dreaming of horse-drawn carriages, and with the thunder of hooves echoing in his ears. He discovered that in the night his mother had coughed up blood, lots of it, and Winthrop had been summoned. They bundled her off, not letting her kiss her son's brow. She traveled to Coimbatore, and from there the narrow-gauge toy train took her up the mountain to a hill station sitting just below Ooty. Dr. Ross had built a sanatorium in the Nilgiri Hills fashioned after Trudeau's famed Saranac Lake in New York. The white cottages around the hospital were replicas of those at Saranac, with the same airy porches and trundle beds.
Thomas wept himself to sleep on Sebestie's bony chest. He was angry with Hilda for getting sick, for having fostered such a closeness with him so as to make this separation unbearable. He was not like his schoolmates who loved their ayahs more than their parents and cared nothing about long separations. Overnight, Sebestie blossomed into a surrogate mother, but Thomas was wary of giving her his love. For then she, too, might disappear.
Before school Thomas visited St. Mary's and recited fifty Our-Father-Hail-Marys and did the same on his way back. He was on his knees so often that boggy sacs formed under his kneecaps. Around his neck he fastened with twine the heavy crucifix that had been on her wall, hiding it under his school uniform, where it gouged the skin over his breastbone and the twine cut into his neck. Not having a firstborn or a ram or ewe, he sacrificed his Don Bradman signature cricket bat, smashed it on the washing stone. He fasted till he was dizzy. He cut his forearm with a razor, spilling blood onto the shrine for the Virgin Mary that he built in his room. Sebestie took him to the Mambalam Temple and even to the tiny pavement temple behind their house. If it was up to God, He did not seem to listen.
Meanwhile his father never missed a stop on his circuit: Vellore, Madurai, Tuticorin, and parts in between. When Justifus Stone was home, he barely had time to remove his pith helmet or unpack his bags before he was off again. Justifus called his son the Archbishop of Canterbury, and if these were words of reassurance, they did nothing for Thomas. He spoke to his son as if he were addressing multitudes. At night Thomas could hear his uneven footsteps like those of a giant in a bedroom of Lilliputian dimensions who could not help knocking over furniture. It was a relief when Justifus went out on tour again.
A YEAR PASSED with Thomas living all but parentless in the big house, along with Sebestie, Durai (the cook), the maali, Sethuma (who washed clothes and swabbed the tile floors), and an untouchable who came once a week to clean the toilets—that was his family.
On Christmas Day, son and backslapping father came together for dinner; his father's clerk, Andrew Fothergill, was their sole guest. “Well, what a feast! Good to have you all. Fine repast, just fine. Eat, do eat”—this when it was just the three of them at the table, with Durai waiting behind the kitchen door. “We can't let them get away with it all. There is money to be made in coir. Rope, you know, or matting. We deserve, we earned it, I'll say, and by golly we are going to have it,” and on he went, barely stopping to swallow, the crumbs spraying from his lips. Fothergill tried valiantly to connect Justifus's thoughts, to give his superior's scattered remarks a spine, a thread of meaning. Justifus began to rub one thigh, then the other, fidgeting, glancing down with irritation as if the dog were underfoot, but of course she never came into the house when Justifus was around. By the time pudding was served the leg rubbing was so furious that Thomas had to ask, Please, sir, what is wrong.
“I have fur on me legs, son. Keeps me from feeling, it does. Ruddy nuisance.” His father struggled to rise, almost upsetting the table in the process. He stumbled out, grabbing sideboard and wall, his feet sticking like magnets to the floor. Thomas remembered Fothergill's look of consolation as the boy saw the guest to the door.
Jan. 20,
My darling son,
My temperatures were 36.7, 37.2. 37. 8, 37.3. I threw out the 38.6 because I didn't believe it. They roll our beds out to the porch, and back in at night. In and out. I'm not even allowed to go the lavatory. TOTAL BED REST, though the huge effort this requires seems to be against the idea of rest. I find it difficult to believe that on this porch, with the mist outside and the air so cold, that a body can generate a temperature over 36 degrees. No wonder we are called warm-blooded animals.
She had circled a splotch on the page and captioned it with “My tears, as I cry for you, my darling boy.” In each letter Hilda told him that he must be brave, and be patient.
TIME FOR THOMAS was no longer divided by days and nights or seasons. Time was a seamless yearning for his mother.
They say I have not made any great improvement but that I should be glad I am no worse …
He went through the motions at school. She exhorted him to pray, told him that she prayed every hour and that God listened and prayer never failed. He prayed constantly, convinced that at the very least the prayers kept her alive.