Fall on Your Knees (13 page)

When she is overcome by boredom, Kathleen’s eyes often stray to this picture, it being the one focal point for covert day-dreaming not disapproved of by Sister Saint Monica, who is given to impromptu anecdotes on the lives of the saints in amongst lessons on the earth’s crust and its chief capitals. The girls all know that the Prairies are the bread-basket of Canada and that Saint Monica was the mother of the greatest of all Church fathers, Saint Augustine. In his youth, Augustine lived in sin with a heathen African woman. His mother prayed for his redemption and one day, when Augustine was strolling in a garden, he heard a child’s voice sing out, “Take it, read it!” It was the Bible talking. Augustine deserted his African concubine, converted to Christianity and became the scourge of fornicators. And Rangoon is the capital of Burma.

This afternoon, however, Kathleen’s eyes are not on Saint Monica’s picture. Kathleen is far far away in the English countryside, where she lives with her widowed father in a manor house —

“Kathleen!”

Kathleen jolts at her desk and looks up into Sister Saint Monica’s towering wimple.

“Yes, sister?”

“What could possibly be more engrossing than the formation of glacial moraine?” Sister Saint Monica does not wait for an answer, but seizes Kathleen’s novel from behind its camouflage
Geography of the British Empire
.

“Claudia
, by A.L.O.E. Who” — scathing tones — “is A. L. O. E.?”

Kathleen feels herself blush. She looks down. “… A Lady of England.”

“I beg your pardon? You have a voice, don’t you?” — titters from the class — “Use it.”

Kathleen looks up,

“A Lady of England.”

“A Lady of England, what?”

“A Lady of England, sister.”

Kathleen swallows as Sister Saint Monica scans the page. The other girls start whispering. “Silence!” Silence. Sister dangles the book before Kathleen and commands, “Share a few gems with the class.”

Kathleen takes the book and bites her lip.

“Loudly and clearly. I for one do not wish to miss a single charming word.”

Kathleen starts anywhere, reads, “‘I often catch a glimpse —’”

Singsong: “I can’t hear you, Kathleen.”

“‘— of dark robes —’”

“Louder.”

“‘— passing across the little open space yonder —’”

“Good, continue.”

“‘— with something of the longing for forbidden fruit.’”

Giggles on all sides. Kathleen takes a breath, blinks. Continues, “‘Doubtless one would get a knowledge of good and evil by being better acquainted with convent life. I suspect more of the evil than of the good … ’” Gasps from the other girls. Kathleen waits, her eyes on the book, please don’t make me continue.

“Continue.”

“‘but Papa forbade me to hold any intercourse whatsoever with the Romanist ladies.’”

Silence, shocked and appalled. Sorrowful sister. “Girls, profit and perpend. This is a piece of unalloyed trash, a libel hatched by a low type of woman whose refusal to publish under her true name testifies to the evil of her intentions. No one but an idiot or a fiend could derive pleasure between its covers; which, Kathleen, are you?”

Kathleen can’t look up. All around her, petty triumph.

She forces herself to answer, which is, in itself, a defiance. “Neither.”

Sister Saint Monica confiscates the book and swishes away to her desk.

Sister Saint Monica is the one teacher who does not subscribe to the untouchability of Kathleen Piper. She has been looking for an opportunity to give the girl the gift of mortification, but it hasn’t been easy; Kathleen is a model student and it is well nigh impossible to put one’s finger on the insolent pride that colours her flawless manners — not to mention the unsubstantiated but unmistakeable whiff of immodesty. “I’ll teach her,” thinks Sister Saint Monica, locking the offending book in her desk.

“She’ll learn,” thinks Kathleen, staring at the inkwell, hot with humiliation. “She’ll be sorry, I’ll kill her with a stake in her heart, I’ll be famous and she’ll be ugly and dead, I’d like to poke out her eye, I’ll show her. She’s not worth showing.” Kathleen bites her lip. Hard. “I’ll show them all.” She feels her eyes brim up. Don’t cry. Don’t. Stare. Harder.

Kathleen glares out the window at the blast furnaces of Dominion Iron and Steel; imagines herself bursting in flames from the stack and soaring all the way to La Scala. Or anywhere, so long as it’s far from this one-horse burg, this wretched rock, these horrible girls —

“I said! Advance to the front.”

Kathleen starts and looks up. Sister is waiting on her high platform in front of the blackboard —
Ice Age, Cretaceous, mass extinction
— what now? Kathleen slides from her desk, leaving palm prints on its surface, snagging her woollen stocking on a splinter, and walks the gauntlet of female eyes.

“Face the class.”

Kathleen obeys. The next thing she knows, she is showered with scrap paper and pencil shavings, and the lights have gone out.

“Since you’re so eager to fill your head with garbage,” says Sister Saint Monica, “you may as well have a garbage can on your shoulders.”

Shrieks of laughter.

“That’s enough, girls. Now, Kathleen. Sing for us.”

Kathleen is paralysed. Blinking into the darkness of the metal can, she feels sweat trickling under her arms, between her legs.

“You’re a ‘songstress’, aren’t you?” —
whack!
— the yardstick against the side of the can.

Kathleen is spared the sight of row after row of girls with their hands clamped over their mouths, plugging their noses against hilarity, crossing their legs — “I said sing!”

Only one song presents itself, perversely, to her mind, and she begins, muffled and echoey: “‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen … ’” — hysterical laughter, sister gives them free rein — “‘Across the ocean wild and wide —

“Louder.”

“‘To where your heart has ever been — Since first you were my bonny bride’” — a bare thread of a voice is all that’s available to Kathleen, and it breaks.

“Continue.”

“‘The roses all have left your cheek — I’ve watched them fade away and die — Your voice is sad whene’er you speak. And tears bedim your loving eyes…. ’”

Kathleen is finally crying. Helpless, enraged. What’s worse is that she hates this song — old-fashioned, sickly sweet, nothing to do with her but her name: “‘Oh I will take you back, Kathleen, To where your heart will feel no pain — And when the fields are fresh and green, I’ll take you to your home again.’”

The song finished, Kathleen waits in dread to be dismissed — how can she possibly remove this can from her head in front of everyone? She knows she must, eventually. Some day. She has to go to the loo. She feels as though she’s wet her pants with shame. Surely that’s not possible, surely she would know if she had…. Kathleen realizes that she’s been standing there for some time. And that Sister Saint Monica has resumed the lesson.

“… And what occasioned the putting aside of Saint Augustine’s African concubine?”

“Oh, sister, sister, I know —”

“One at a time, girls.”

Kathleen stands motionless until the bell signals lunch and she hears Sister Saint Monica swish out after the last pupil.

Kathleen has no friends. She has her work and she’s grateful for that because friends are simply not to be had at Holy Angels. Not that Kathleen goes out of her way: “Snob.” Seeing her up there, anonymous, with a green metal garbage can for a head, hiding that conceited face — why do people think she’s so pretty, her hair is horrible, it’s
red
. That’s all it is. Not “auburn,” not “strawberry blonde,” red. Like a demon, like a floozie. Kathleen’s ordeal at the hands of Sister Saint Monica soothes a lot of badly ruffled feathers.

The truth is, Kathleen has no idea how to go about making a friend. She has been trained to live for that glorious place, the Future. Friends are superfluous. This is reinforced by the tacit understanding that she is not to bring anyone home. Something to do with Mumma. She and Daddy would never say it, but they both know it.

Other girls spend nights at each others’ homes, tucked in together talking till dawn. Kathleen overhears them whispering in the lavatory. She never finds out that Daddy would not let her spend a night at a friend’s house, because she is never invited. James is planning to send her all the way to Italy by herself, but that’s different. That’s Life. The other is Nonsense. And who knows what another girl’s father might get into his head? Kathleen is chaperoned every moment but she does not see it that way. Freedom consists of being insulated from the envy and ignorance of the unimportant people who temporarily surround her.

Now, after five years at Holy Angels, Kathleen would not know a friend if one sank its teeth into her wrist — which is more or less what she expects from the mass of other girls. She skirts them cautiously, as if they were dangerous wild animals loitering about a common watering-hole ready to pounce, you’d never know why or what hit you. She fears them, sharp glinting creatures, and hasn’t a clue what they talk about or how they do it. How they merge into gregarious packs. Kathleen is in fact horribly shy, but no one would ever suspect it — after all, she gets up and sings in front of halls full of people.

What seals Kathleen’s fate, however, is the presence of several Mahmoud cousins at Holy Angels. One of them has even been in her class for the past six years. Though Materia hasn’t wanted the girls to know anything at all about the shame of family exile, and has concocted her story about “the Old Country,” James has told Kathleen the truth: Your mother and I were very young. We eloped. It was wrong, but what was worse was the behaviour of the Mahmouds. Barbaric. They are from a part of the world that hasn’t seen a moment’s peace in hundreds of years, little wonder. You have cousins at Holy Angels. Ignore them. Don’t give them the opportunity to snub you. Carry yourself like you own the place.

The Mahmouds are rich and civic-minded. The Mahmoud girls are popular, each of them a gleaming clear-eyed olive in plaid and perfect English. They have been told that Kathleen is the daughter of the Devil, and have duly accorded her a wide berth. To befriend Kathleen is to offend the Mahmoud girls. You can’t have it both ways.

But is there not one potential friend among the horde, one bookish girl, plain as a rainy Tuesday, or so beautiful as to be unafraid? One who does not travel with the pack, who might come forward as a friend for Kathleen? No. Kathleen’s fortress, her tower of creamy white, is steep and terrible. No one comes in or out. Except for her father, Sister Saint Cecilia and a select few minions necessary to support life. Such as her mother. Such as the buggy driver.

The other girls salve their corrosive envy and allay their fear of Kathleen, the antisocial prodigy, with an invigorating dose of racial hatred:

“She may be peaches and cream but you should see her mother … black as the ace of spades, my dear.”

“You know that sort of thing stays in the blood. Evangeline Campbell’s mother’s cousin knows a girl had a baby in Louisburg? Black as coal, my dear, and the both their families white as snow and blond blond.”

“We should’ve never let the coloureds into this country in the first place.”

“My uncle saw a coloured woman driving a cart with a load of coal, the next morning he was dead.”

“They have a smell, they do.”

“Kathleen Piper belongs in The Coke Ovens!”

And they laugh.

Naturally, this remedy is never indulged when the Mahmoud girls are around. That wouldn’t do, they’re nice girls and rich rich. The brothers of Holy Angels have already begun lining up.

No girlfriend has ever made it up to the tower chamber.

Three Sisters

Frances has discovered a new game: exploring the mysteries of the teenager, Kathleen. Unfortunately, she is too young to know how to investigate thoroughly without leaving a trace.

“Come here, you little brat.”

Frances peeks out from behind Mercedes with a guilty twinkle in her eye, her hands folded innocently behind her back, and enters Kathleen’s boudoir.

“If you come in here again I’ll tell Pete to get after you,” says Kathleen, enthroned at her vanity, where she has just discovered the comb where the brush should be and a candy heart gumming up one of her good lace hankies.

“Who’s Pete?” asks Frances.

“He’s the
bodechean
and he’s going to drag you to hell!”

Frances laughs. Mercedes’s eyes grow round as saucers and she says, “That’s not nice.”

“Not you, sweetie.” Kathleen holds out her arms and Mercedes approaches. Kathleen pops her onto her knee. “He doesn’t get after good little girls. What shall we read?”

“Water Babies.”
Mercedes chooses Frances’s favourite out of love for her little sister, who doesn’t mean to be naughty.

Kathleen eyes Frances’s crooked grin. “Come here, you rascal, you can listen too.”

Frances climbs onto the other knee. The two little girls look at each other and squirm, hands clamped over their mouths, cheeks ballooning with suppressed rapture.

“Quit wriggling or I’ll stick you on a pin and use you for bait in the creek.”

Mercedes composes herself; Frances shrieks with laughter and asks, “Can I play with your hair?”

“What do you say?”

“Please.”

“What else?”

“With a whole bunch of cream and a cherry and fruit and candy.”

“What else?”

“And a sword and a bug and a worm. And a bare bum!”

Mercedes says to herself on behalf of Frances, “Sorry dear God.” Kathleen laughs and Frances giggles passionately, poised to plunge both hands into the red sea, but Kathleen holds out,

“What word am I thinking of?”

“Lantern.”

“Nope.”

“Stick.”

“Nope.”

“Matchbox.”

“No.”

“Teapot.”

“Right.”

“Yay!”

“Don’t pull it or I’ll skin you. ‘Once upon a time there was a little chimney sweep….

Kathleen has taken to spending time with her little sisters. At first she does this for Daddy’s sake, because she knows that otherwise they get nothing but their mother’s barbaric yammer during the day while she’s at school — she can smell it hanging in the air when she gets home. But as the school-days and the war drag along and Kathleen becomes lonelier, she grows to cherish the time with her little sisters every bit as much as they do. Sunday mornings, she allows them to sit on two stools at the threshold of her room — “If I’m in the mood” — and witness her toilette. They sit as still as they can, enthralled, while Kathleen sings the world’s greatest songs in her opera voice, and slips on a white cotton blouse over her lace-embroidered petticoat. She turns the cuffs, fashions a Windsor knot in her striped silk tie, and pulls on her tan linen skirt, flared at the ankle — “My bicycling costume,” she calls it, although she does not possess a bicycle. Evenings after school, she stands with her arms akimbo at the door to the forbidden chamber, and groans, “Oh all right, you can come in. But not a peep! I’m studying.”