Fall on Your Knees (45 page)

“Josephine, Evan, come here till I annihilate the both of you, what’s this?”

“I’m sorry, Mumma — Sorry, Mumma.”

Two soft earlobes pierced between stiletto thumbs and forefingers,

“I’ll tell what’s this, this is your baby brother Carvery playing with the stove!”

“Yes ma’am — Yes ma’am.”

Release earlobes, ah.

“He is your brother. You are responsible for him and you are responsible for each other.”

“Yes ma’am — Yes ma’am.”

“You never, ever let your family come in harm’s way.”

“No ma’am — No ma’am.”

Then she threatens them with retribution by their father when he gets home and the two children breathe a sigh of relief, because what they’ll get from their father is “Well now, how did that happen?” and a seat in his cushiony lap.

At the kitchen table.

Adelaide sits down to her buttons and bolts of precious fabric. Princely knickerbockers for Frederick, gentleman trousers for Evan, white shirts and collars for them both, Sunday dresses decked with ribbons for the girls, a swashbuckling shirt of sun, moon and stars for Leo and a matching one for baby Carvery. And finally, although she is mortified to spend the time on it — “I’m only doing this to please you, mister” — sleeveless, slinky, low-slung, black satin and tropical green polka-dots. When you see Adelaide in this dress, you’ll have to ask her to dance just to feel her slip through your arms like a flashy fish.

At the matinée.

“Has the picture started?”

“Nearly over with.”

“One, please.”

Ginger hands over his nickel and enters the Empire. It’s a silent,
Diary of a Lost Girl
starring Louise Brooks. Not many people. It should be easy to spot Frances if she’s here. He stands at the top of the raked aisle and waits until his eyes resolve the shadows into shapes. The outline of her beret. Front row centre, but she’s not alone.

The picture ends, “
IF THERE WERE MORE LOVE IN THIS WORLD, NO ONE WOULD EVER HAVE TO BE LOST
.” The lights come up and he watches Frances rise from her seat. Her companion looks to be a child, though Ginger is wary of jumping to that conclusion any more. But no, it’s definitely a real little girl, he sees that when she stands and turns to collect her sweater from the back of her seat. A really pretty child, with long red-gold hair past her waist, familiar in some way. Now that he sees Frances next to a real child he can’t imagine how he ever mistook her for one. Actually, her face looks quite old. He watches. The two of them start along their row to the aisle and the long-haired child seems to stumble to one side. Then again, and with each step. She must have hurt herself somehow, he thinks, but he understands when she rounds the last seat in the row and walks towards him up the aisle. Pretty little gal, what a shame. The youngest Piper child, of course, and that’s who she reminds me of, her older sister Kathleen. The closer she gets, the more uncanny the resemblance.

Ginger waits for Frances to see him. But if she does, she doesn’t give any sign. She’s chatting to her little sister, “Next Saturday is
The Wind
starring Lillian Gish, it’s about a beautiful girl who goes out west but when she gets there the wind buggers her mind.”

“How does it bugger it?”

“Don’t say ‘bugger’, Lily, say ‘derange’.”

“Derange.”

Frances puts an arm around Lily and walks right past Ginger.

“Hello, Frances.”

The long-haired child turns and gives him her green eyes — so like the girl Kathleen, but so unlike too because Kathleen never once looked at him. Frances doesn’t turn, just yanks the little sister after her, nearly knocking her off balance. Ginger is confused. Is this a slap in the face? If so, what for? He feels like someone’s dirty secret. But I’m not. I haven’t done anything wrong and don’t intend to. Don’t want to!

But he has to talk to her. Tell her she can’t be skulking around his house like that, and not to be coming on like a whore with him, he’s not that kind of man. Yes, he has to talk to her as soon as possible. That means the speak. Tonight, Saturday.

Ginger has no intention of ever entering that Pandora’s box again, so he doesn’t even bother to leave his house until three a.m., when he knows she’ll be leaving.

“Sorry, Addy, I forgot to tell you, Jameel said for me to come at closing.”

The second lie. How is Adelaide to protect her family when she doesn’t know what from? She had seen with a chill that the fake Girl Guide bore no good will towards her husband. Like a fiend she looked at him: starved but patient.

Adelaide hears the front door shut behind Ginger. She rolls over in bed wondering, what does she want with him? And what could Leo possibly see in that dirty little white thing? Crazy girl, bad pixie, nobody’s child…. Adelaide sits up with a jolt as it hits her: he feels sorry for her. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no.

Ginger waits behind a wooden support under the rail bridge as the clientele spills out of Jameel’s. The piano is going a mile a minute — “The Funeral March”. With the last of the revellers gone, Ginger goes round back. He figures he’ll catch her before she gets into whatever car takes her home. He watches from the corner of the building as she comes out. In the cast of light he sees she’s back in uniform but still in make-up and costume jewellery. A lot of those men in there, and the women too who laugh along, they see her as their clown. The whore part is bad enough, but who ever heard of a whore clown? Ginger wonders what it must be like to see through the eyes of those who could find her funny or sexy. She locks the storage-room door and Ginger is about to reveal his presence when she takes off into the dark — what? Where’d she go?

He doesn’t want to holler, doesn’t want Jameel in on this. He goes round the front. No waiting car, and he’s heard no engine. Overhead, the rat-a-tat of a stick along the railway ties. He looks up through the trestlework at the shadow feet flying between the slats and follows at a trot below. The ground rises to meet the rail line and he runs up the bank, getting winded, but she’s still sprinting ahead, taking the ties three at a time with her arms flying out from her sides. By now they’re on the edge of town, she tosses away her stick. He bends over to get his breath — he’s not the sporty type. When he straightens up he can see her way ahead in the moonlight, seeming to jump up and down on one spot in a wild step-dance but getting smaller, smaller. He trots on.

To his left the water gleams dark silver beyond the cliff, the sound of his breath and pounding chest drown out his own footfalls along with the crickets and frogs singing now in the high weeds that line the tracks. They’re travelling parallel to the Shore Road. She’s running the whole way, this is how she gets home. Lord. They’re way past town, it should be safe to call, “Fra —” and he’s flat on his face on the piss-reeking tracks, his gut shocked airless, his back only now registering the impact that sent him flying forward — something grabs a fist of his hair and slams him into the gravel again and again and again, and darkness.

Tonight, Frances extinguishes her candle before she steps into the attic. It’s the moon. Four rectangles of light have swooned through the latticed window onto the floor. The moon may drive men mad but it can calm a savage girl, for it is cool, precise, it is lucid. Especially in such an empty room. Frances pauses and allows herself to be soothed. Then she goes to the window. It’s a good night for gazing.

One floor below, at the rear of the house, Lily is at her bedroom window watching the creek. Her lips are moving slightly as though whispering to someone down there, but there’s not a soul to be seen, just shimmering segments of the moon in the water. Across the hall, and directly beneath the attic window where Frances has just seated herself, James is sound asleep, dreaming plentifully, the way he has since Frances receded from his life. He is a little boy again, and it’s just he and his mother in a field of wildflowers. Mercedes is sleeping too, in her spare room, the whites of her brown eyes just showing in slits through nearly closed lids. She dreams of steel, of the colour grey, of skeins of grey hair on a loom.

Frances strokes Trixie in her lap and realizes she’s been followed home. She can see Boutros down there, though he can’t see her. He’s peering up, waiting for her candle to appear and warm the room. He’s staring at the windowpane, but all he can see there is the moon.

Frances hasn’t kept herself a technical virgin just to be raped by something the size of that — and why else did he follow me home? In her head is
The Catholic Wife
. Years ago she rifled Ralph Luvovitz’s room when they were all supposed to be playing Klesmer music downstairs, and robbed him of
What Every Boy Should Know. The Catholic Wife
was easier to come by but is much more complicated. A Catholic wife must keep a graph in her head at all times, plotting the ponderous journey of the ovum, stolid as an ice-breaker, to its point of intersection with a zillion speedboats. On average, there are six or seven days a month when this is fairly likely to happen, whereas the rest of the time it’s fairly likely not to happen. That’s the rhythm method. Like comedy, it’s about timing. Rhythm is a sin, of course, but only a venial one and sanctioned by the Holy Father in Rome, provided you are without lust when performing the generative act and not hoping not to get pregnant. (Unless you are performing the generative act in order to ward off your husband’s lust for another woman, in which case it is a sin for you to give in to his lust, but one mitigated by your intention of preventing him from committing a worse sin with a woman not his wife. Go to confession, you’re fine.) Every other type of birth control is a mortal sin for which you go directly to hell if unshriven at the hour of death.

Frances gets her period almost not at all but its scantiness is completely regular. Tonight is the first of the five or six probably fertile days. And this makes her shudder at the thought of Boutros loitering down there in the yard, because it’s bad enough thinking about him going up her, much less a chip off that massive block coming out her nine months from now. She’ll have to speed things up. She is irritated. Why did Ginger Taylor have to turn out to be a nice man?

Via Dolorosa

“Coupla drunks jumped me outside Jameel’s.”

The third lie.

“Ow, Addy, easy!”

Adelaide picks out another wood splinter and jabs carbolic at Ginger’s chewed forehead. Luckily, that’s the strongest part of the skull. Lucky too that his nose and teeth only grazed gravel while his forehead took the railway tie. Luckiest of all was being lulled awake by the warm buzz of the steel rails beneath him in time to roll over and let the noon coal-train pass. Who’s his guardian angel?

“I want to know who she is and no bullshit.”

“What?” But it’s useless to pretend. Why did he for one second think she’d buy it? “She’s one of the Piper girls from New Waterford.”

Adelaide gets a chill, but she just nods and says, “Frances.” She knows the bad one is called Frances.

“I don’t know what she wants. I went after her last night but I got jumped before I could ask her, I don’t know by who or how many.”

Adelaide looks at him. Waiting for the rest.

“I’m sorry, Addy. I gave her a drive once, that’s all, I don’t know why I lied before.” He’s feeling suddenly tired. “She’s the little girl at the speak and I wanted to help her. I thought we could help her.”

Adelaide folds a soft white dressing for his brow. “There’s a lot of trouble in that family, Leo. That girl is not right in the head. She’ll see you in jail for rape.”

Ginger is shocked. “I would never, never —”

“The Pipers have money. You’re a coloured man, and that girl is after you.”

With the dressing round his head and his face scabbing over nicely, he knocks at the steel door.

“You want a fuckin raise, b’y, is that it?”

“No, Mr Jameel, I just quit, tell Piper I quit him too.”

“Tell him yourself.”

Ginger turns to leave, saying, “Then I guess he’ll find out when I don’t come for your order.” Ginger wants a wide berth between him and all things Piper.

“Fuckin nigger, get the fuck off my property — Boutros!”

Ginger is already leaving but he won’t run. He glances behind him to see the big son in the doorway. Ginger’s not scared of Boutros, despite the crack on the neck he got when he grabbed Jameel that time — the boy was just protecting his father. Ginger knows fellas like that are sooner pussycats than fighters.

“Fuckin nigger,” mutters Jameel. “Get the car, b’y,” to Boutros without looking at him.

“Daddy, I’m going to get married.”

Jameel wheels and swats Boutros across the face, “Get the fuckin car!”

That was around five o’clock.

“What kind of trouble?” Ginger asks.

Ginger knows the basic facts about the Pipers — what everyone knows and what he picked up driving to and from their house for years. Nowadays he hauls Piper’s booze, but that only ever takes him to the still in the woods and all Piper ever says is “Thank you, Leo, drive safe.”

But Adelaide knows what Teresa has told her. Teresa would never dream of telling such things to her little brother. Ginger was a sweet child, and keeping him from everything unpleasant is second nature to her. Besides, there are some things that are right to tell a woman friend, but otherwise indecent to repeat. Some things, when discussed with a dear husband or brother, are only poison. Good women discuss these things the way epidemiologists identify and track disease without alarming the public. This is woman’s work. Men are unfitted for it by nature and should be protected from it the same way women shouldn’t have to go down the mines. Men are so innocent.

“Tell me Addy.”

The time has come for inoculation. Adelaide takes a deep breath.

“The mother committed suicide. That was Mahmoud’s daughter, Materia, who ran off with Piper. Mahmoud disowned her. Their daughter, the one with the voice who you drove —”

“Kathleen —”

“She had a baby out of wedlock, the little crippled gal. Piper killed his daughter by not calling the doctor when she was dying in childbed. Pearleen Campbell works at Ferguson’s Funeral Parlour, she washed the body, there was a homemade cut in the belly, Pearleen and Teresa were girls together that’s how Teresa knows. Years ago, Teresa took a big cheque to Piper from old man Mahmoud. Next thing you know, the singer girl goes to New York City, meantime her mother’s in rags. The singer girl was a bitch. The mother died the day after her daughter was put in the ground, not a mark on her but her hair reeking of gas when they brought her to Ferguson’s. Teresa went to the mother’s funeral and saw the girl Frances laughing. That’s what I know, so God knows what else there is, or what that Frances girl was b’ought up with. She’s got a reason to be crazy, b’y, but that don’t make her innocent.”