The Second Life of Samuel Tyne Read Online Free PDF

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,