Fall on Your Knees (38 page)

Frances remains a technical virgin throughout. What is she saving herself for? She can’t say. It’s a feeling. There is something left for her to do. “For Lily.” What, Frances? Something.

Every night, when the last drunks are being peeled off the floor and deposited outside, Frances passes through the tired curtains to the back room and changes. One night, early in her career, she tiptoed up the back stairs and discovered her Aunt Camille sitting in a kitchen, playing solitaire under a dim yellow bulb. Again Frances was struck sad by the sullen heap so like and unlike Mumma. Camille was too absorbed in her cards to notice Frances peering around the door-jamb. Frances watched Camille sip her tea and cheat.

Frances can’t help but wonder how Camille wound up here, married to Jameel. But then, look where Mumma ended up. Maybe Camille eloped too. Frances’s reflections on the subject of romance are summed up by the last scene of
Pandora’s Box:
when Louise Brooks finally gives it away to a fella for free, he ups and kills her.

Frances has no desire to penetrate any further the shabby mystery of Aunt Camille, so she hasn’t repeated her foray into the upper domestic reaches of the speak. Come closing time she removes her costume among the crates and kegs of the chilly back room and washes her face and hands at the pump. She never washes the costumes. She climbs into her beige woollen stockings, her black button-boots, Girl Guide uniform and beret, and heads back to New Waterford.

Lily is always faithfully at the window, ready with the sheet, even though Daddy never gets home before Frances on weekends any more. James doesn’t want to be there when Frances “sneaks” in or out. He doesn’t want to know where she goes. In the mornings he glances into her room, half expecting to find her gone. Run off with a man, perhaps. Perhaps dead in a ditch.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” rasps Frances, and Lily lowers the knotted bedsheet. Frances is usually fairly sober by the time she climbs in the window, unless she has nicked a jar for the road.

“Want a sip, Lily?”

“No thank you.”

“C’m’ere, dollface.” Lily steps onto Frances’s feet and they spin about while Frances sings, “‘Let’s dance, though you’ve only a small room, make it your ballroom, let’s dance’ —”

Mercedes stands in the darkened doorway, spectral in her white nightgown.

“Join me in a nightcap, toots?”

“Frances, you’re drunk.”

Frances rattles, “The-sheet-is-slit-who-slit-the-sheet-whoever-slit-the-sheet-is-a-good-sheet-slitter. Say it fast, Lily.”

“Frances, it’s time to go to bed.” Mercedes tries to sound calm and bossy at the same time.

“Piss on you, sister.” Frances laughs.

Occasionally, if she’s feeling up to it and Frances is sufficiently intoxicated, Mercedes will seize her round the waist, carry her to the waiting tub and bathe her forcibly, uniform and all. Otherwise Frances would not be fit to live with, for she only ever washes her face and hands. And she never washes her uniform. Mercedes rifles the Guide pouch in search of soiled hankies but finds only a dirty white glove.

“Where’s your other glove, Frances?”

“I only use one.”

“Oh. Well, it may as well be clean.”

Mercedes wrings it under the hot water, asking, “Isn’t it rather small for you now?”

“It does the trick.”

Mercedes does not enquire further.

On relatively sober evenings, Frances curls up next to Lily and whispers whiskey in her ear: “Lily. We are the dead” — Lily pretends to be asleep — “except we don’t know it. We think we’re alive, but we’re not. We all died the same time as Kathleen and we’ve been haunting the house ever since.” Lily prays for everyone, in case Frances is right.

On quite sober evenings, Lily confides her fears.

“Frances, do I have to go to Lourdes?”

“No. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Lily tucks her little foot between Frances’s ankles.

“Frances. Al akbar inshallah?”

“In fallah inti itsy-bitsy spider.”

“Ya koosa gingerbread boy kibbeh?”

“Shalom bi’ salami.”

“Aladdin bi’ sesame.”

“Bezella ya aini Beirut.”

“Te’ berini.”

“Te’ berini.”

“Tipperary.”

Every night, pissed or stone sober, Frances puts her money in the secret place for Lily.

Lady Bountiful

Mercedes graduates top of the class of 1930. Ralph Luvovitz is second. Mercedes gives the valedictory address, in which she urges her fellow young citizens to learn from the mistakes of the past, to seize the numerous challenges of the present and to put their trust in God and His only begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.

James sits near the back of the auditorium with Lily and the Luvovitzes. It’s inadvisable for Frances to be seen near the school premises, so she is absent this evening, although earlier in the day Mercedes entered her bedroom to find a new boxed set of Moroccan-bound
The Complete Charlotte Brontë
on her dresser. Oh, Frances! The expense. The dubious source of the requisite funds. The generosity. Mercedes cried and hugged Frances and told her she loved her. Frances told Mercedes not to leak all over her uniform.

After the commencement ceremonies, Mercedes, Lily and James repair to the Luvovitz house for tea. Lily wonders again, but does not ask, why all the mirrors are always covered in Mrs Luv’s house. Mercedes and Ralph play happy-sad Klesmer music on piano and clarinet while Mr Luvovitz sings and dances to the delighted embarrassment of Mrs Luvovitz.

As Mercedes’ and Ralph’s heads incline closer over the old Yiddish songbook, Mr and Mrs L exchange complicated looks across the parlour. James doesn’t notice — he simply enjoys the music, unaccustomedly relaxed. A civilized evening with old friends. We should do this more often. He savours a feeling of normalcy for the first time in years. In the increasing absence of Frances, it has become possible for James, now and then, to feel like a good man.

“Have another
ruggalech
, James.”

“Thank you, Ben, don’t mind if I do. They’re delicious, missus.”

Ralph escorts them home and lingers on the veranda with Mercedes. He tells her he is going away. Not for good. They can write.

“Promise me you’ll write, Mercedes.”

“Of course I will, Ralph.”

His parents have scrimped and saved to send him to McGill University in Montreal.

“I thought you were going to Saint F. X.” Mercedes keeps her voice steady. Saint Frances Xavier University is only a day away by train. It’s where she plans to go. When her family can spare her. But Montreal….

“It’s a great opportunity.”

“Of course it is, Ralph.”

He’s leaving next week, it’s all very sudden. He’s going to live with the Weintraubs, friends of his mother’s relatives who recently emigrated from Munich. They’ve lined up a job for him in a bakery. Ralph is going to be a doctor. He is a scrupulous boy and so does not make any rash proposals of which he is as yet unworthy. He will wait until he has finished his undergraduate degree, then he will ask Mercedes to be his wife.

“Mercedes….”

“Yes, Ralph?”

Mercedes heart beats so rapidly that she fears it has set the ruffles of her yellow silk blouse aflutter. Ralph leans abruptly down and brushes her lips with his own. Then he is away, leaving Mercedes breathless.

Upstairs, she cools her cheek against the scarlet leather of her brand-new edition of
Jane Eyre
.

Mercedes and Ralph exchange fervid newsy letters all that summer and through the fall. Their correspondence gives Mercedes strength to endure; to postpone the beginning of her life. She has turned down her scholarship to Saint Frances Xavier University, for how can she think of leaving home when Lily is still a child? Mercedes is so accustomed to doing everything for Daddy’s sake that it seems natural to assign this sacrifice to him as well. But deep down another purpose has been emerging: Frances needs looking after. More than Daddy. More than Lily. What if I were far away at school in Antigonish and Frances didn’t come home one night?

In the meantime, Mercedes is not at a loss for worthwhile work. She has her project: Lily. There have not been any more overt “signs” since the night of Lily’s illness last November. Mercedes does not include — indeed tries not to notice — the reddish highlights that have since appeared in Lily’s hair. And she reminds herself that miracles alone are not sufficient to indicate that special closeness to God which is sainthood; the Life too will be taken into account. To this end, she redoubles her charitable efforts with Lily in tow.

The abundance of free time on Mercedes’ hands now that she is no longer at school dwindles to a pittance once she has scheduled the needs of her community. She learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You’ll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is. Especially in a mining town. Especially in the Depression.

Mercedes bends with grim determination to her mission — if it were enjoyable to immerse oneself in the malodorous misery of the less fortunate, it could not be counted a sacrifice. Offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory. And remember, time is of the essence: saints who are revealed in childhood rarely live to adulthood. Lily’s life has already been painful and Mercedes expects it to be short. She prays. Lily need only survive to celebrate her fourteenth birthday. In the Lourdes tin there is almost thirty dollars.

Mercedes has observed Lily’s particular gift with the veterans. On the top floor of the pleasant west wing of New Waterford General Hospital, there live a handful of men whose injuries and lack of family have rendered them permanent residents. Some have no arms or legs. Three were gassed — they are perfectly fine and whole other than their lungs. They sit quietly near the window wearing their oxygen masks till the sun goes down and it’s time to lie perfectly still in their oxygen tents. Their eyes have enlarged and the lines have dropped away from around their mouths behind the masks. They look like big children — maybe that’s why they like to see Lily coming. They are child grown-ups and she is a grown-up child.

Lily doesn’t flinch when she meets the man with no face, just a blank stretch of baby skin with nose holes and a lipless mouth that doesn’t quite close. He doesn’t mask his missing face because he never goes out and everyone on the ward is used to him; what’s more, he can’t frighten himself, he has no eyes. His great pleasure is a cigarette and, now, touching Lily’s face. He has found the bump in her forehead and it amuses him. He swears he was uglier before and shows Lily a picture to prove it. Lily agrees that he was putrid-looking and he laughs. Mercedes notes this as worthy of inclusion in The Life of Saint Lily, for Mercedes has never known this man to do more than grunt an obscenity, much less laugh.

Lily is not repelled by the veterans. She feels badly for them, they’ve been terribly hurt, but pity is a poison unction. Lily has experienced pity but she didn’t know what to call it, she only knew it made her terribly afraid. As if she had disappeared and become a ghost. Having experienced her own disappearance, she is conscious of how important it is for people to be seen, so when she looks at them — even the blind one — she also looks
for
them, just in case they too have got lost and need finding.

They play gin rummy until she learns poker. The gas men are the only ones who never laugh, though they enjoy themselves.

On the way home, when Mercedes quizzes her, Lily always feels she has somehow let her sister down when she answers truthfully, “I had fun.”

Every evening, when the day’s ministrations are done, Mercedes indulges herself with a gloriously blank sheet of paper: “Dear Ralph….”

There are things Lily could tell Mercedes that would have quite another effect, but it never occurs to her to do so. For example, Mr MacIsaac has stopped drinking. He tells Lily she has healed him. He tells her she has “the gift”. It happened one day when Lily asked to see where he grew the medicine. Mr MacIsaac took her back to his greenhouse.

Mr MacIsaac is also a veteran, though of the Boer War. It too was a bad war. He has said there’s no such thing as a good one. He and Lily both limp on the same side and he likes to tell her they’d run one heck of a three-legged race together. He tells her how like she is to her beautiful sister Kathleen, “God rest her soul.” Especially now that the red is coming out in her hair. “Faery hair” Mr MacIsaac calls it, a twinkle in his kind bleary eye. “Don’t worry, lass, that’s a good thing.”

They went through a canvas door into the greenhouse. The air was mysterious to breathe, damp like an underground lake. There were plants in boxes everywhere, each with a special power but none, it seemed, that could cure him.

But the miraculous thing was overhead. Lily looked up at the glass roof. The sun came out from behind a cloud and filtered through the tiny panes. Before her eyes a host took shape. Shadows of green and grey, a ghostly army in uniform, smiling down at her. For ever young.

Glass photographic plates. Mr MacIsaac collected them — so many were discarded after the war, there being no demand for additional prints of such photos once their subjects had been killed.

“They’re my children,” he said. “We were never blessed with our own, so I think about all the people who lost theirs and how maybe I’d have lost mine too anyhow, things being what they were.”

Mrs MacIsaac had died early that year and people expected Mister to follow soon at the rate he was going, constantly quietly soused.

Lily said, “I’ll be your child.”

He laughed his wheezy laugh, then covered up his face. He reached for her hand and placed it on his bald head. After a while he gave her back her hand and looked up again. He asked her to do something for him.

“Whenever you pass by my door, say a Hail Mary for me. Will you do that?”

Lily promised she would, and she did. Still does. She didn’t tell anyone because it seemed private. Soon people were saying it was a miracle that Mr MacIsaac had quit the bottle. Even though there was barely a soul in town who didn’t owe him money, there was no one who wouldn’t rather see him spry behind his counter.