Fall on Your Knees (16 page)

He digs out the business cards he collected at Kathleen’s recital in Halifax years ago. Makes enquiries. He writes to the chief administrator of the Metropolitan Opera of New York, “Dear Sir: Who, in your expert opinion, would you say is the pre-eminent practitioner in the field of vocal training?” He receives the answer, and sends a lengthy telegram to a man with a German-sounding name in New York City. Receives a reply: “Yes, Herr — will see Kathleen in his studio at 64th Street and Central Park West, 10:00 a.m., March 1, 1918.” James writes to his spinster cousin, Giles, in New York, “… and as my mother always spoke highly of you…. Naturally I am prepared to reimburse you for any and all….”

The time has come. Kathleen is barely eighteen, but her voice is ready. And cousin Giles has agreed to act as chaperone. Moreover, James no longer deludes himself as to where the girl is likely to be safest.

Even with the boots, it becomes apparent that this step will be crushing to the family finances. James does not hesitate. He writes to Mahmoud and asks him straight out for money to send the girl to New York.

The directness of the request startles Mahmoud even more than James’s initial business overture. Ensconced in a mauve satin armchair, his slippered feet resting on a cushioned ottoman, Mahmoud squints and reads the note a second time.

Surrounded as he is by comfortable curves, it is easy to see how angular Mahmoud has become with the years. Business has eroded flesh and sharpened bones; vigilance has contracted the eyes, which are as keen as ever. His hair has thinned to a meticulous steel-grey and two deep lines crease either side of his leather face from cheekbones to jaw. He has grown to resemble his spare wooden chair in the back room of his shop. Only Mrs Mahmoud looks at him now and sees the tall dark and handsome he used to be.

Mahmoud glances up from James’s letter over to the old accursed piano. The voice comes from the Mahmoud side, of course. All the men and women of his family sing. Born singing. It is a gift from God and apparently God and Mr Mahmoud have transmitted this gift through Materia — dead to me, she is dead — to the eldest daughter of the
enklese
bastard. Too bad. She is no granddaughter of mine.

Mahmoud raises the forefinger of his left hand slightly, and his wife replenishes his teacup.

In the kitchen, Teresa Taylor chops parsley for
tabooleh
and wonders why Mr Mahmoud treats his wife like a maid now that he can afford several real ones. The old standby about the strangeness of white people doesn’t really apply here because, although you’d take your life in your hands if you said it, the Mahmouds aren’t really white, are they? They’re something else. They are somewhat coloured. What this means in Nova Scotia at this time is that, for the Mahmouds, the colour bar that guards access to most aspects of society tends to be negotiable. It helps that they have money.

Teresa is a beauty. Although most people in these parts might not think so unless they saw a picture of her in a book about Africa. Everything about Teresa is tall — her face, her eyes especially. Everything about her is fine — her hands dicing tomatoes, her ankles standing, striding between counter, table and sink nine hours a day. Her voice with its trace of Barbados. And beneath her dress, the silver cross she wears that Hector gave her.

Teresa won’t be a maid for ever. She is engaged to be married. She squeezes the juice of three lemons and says a little prayer of thanks to Jesus for keeping Hector safe. In 1914 he volunteered to go overseas and fight but the army wouldn’t have him: this was a white man’s war, they didn’t want “a checkerboard army”. Hector went into the steel plant instead and swore off wars altogether. Now they can’t conscript him because he is in a vital industry. Teresa and Hector are both saving money so that he can go to the United States and study to become an Anglican minister.

Teresa has known Hector all her life. When she was ten, their families came here at the same time, moving from a lush island to a stark one, so their daddies could work, first in the mines, then at the mill. Teresa has grown up in The Coke Ovens section of Sydney’s Whitney Pier and, despite the ongoing battle with grime from the trains and smokestacks, she wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, except New York City. That’s where she and Hector will move once they’re married.

Thus, Teresa does not begrudge a single working hour at the Mahmouds. And it really isn’t a bad job. She likes the food she’s learned to prepare for them — this
tabooleh
, for instance. It makes a nice change from the Anglos and Scotch she has worked for, with their endless meat and potatoes and not a spice in sight. Most of the Mahmouds are very friendly and they know how to throw a party — always singing, with no need of liquor to let go, not like the meat-and-potato set. And Mr Mahmoud pays well. Teresa has already started buying her trousseau. He expects the best but, unlike most, he’s prepared to pay for it — he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. Nor has he ever made an improper advance, though he does have a temper. Ask his daughters. In the meantime, Teresa works hard, stays out of his way, and feels sorry for her. Mrs Mahmoud has everything money can buy — not to mention a devoted family and lots of grandchildren. But she has a private sorrow, too, Teresa can tell. Teresa drains the water from the cracked wheat the Lebanese call
burghul
, and folds it into the spiced meat — they’re having
kibbeh
tonight.

In the big front room, Mr Mahmoud dozes while his wife, Giselle, looks on. Except for her grey bun, she seems not to have changed at all over the years. The same smooth round face, round arms, soft eyes. She is wearing her moonstone ring and strand of genuine pearls to please her husband. Carefully, she removes the note from his hand and takes it into the kitchen.

“Teresa. Read please.”

Mrs Mahmoud has never learned to read English. Teresa reads the letter aloud, then says, “Kathleen Piper. That’s the young lady we heard sing at the Lyceum before the war.”

Mrs Mahmoud nods. “My granddaughter.”

Teresa raises an eyebrow. The girl my little brother ferries to and from school. The princess who has never spoken a single word to him. The one with the voice. Well. “That’s your granddaughter, Mrs Mahmoud?”

Giselle nods.

That night in bed, Giselle skilfully enlightens her husband as to his own intentions. In the morning he writes a cheque. He tells himself that he does it for Giselle. But as he writes the third zero, he reflects upon the future of the family voice. Universally acclaimed. The crowning glory of his success in the New World.

Only Teresa will do for an errand of such importance, and Mahmoud puts the envelope into her hand, saying, “Get a receipt.” Teresa sets out for New Waterford, where she anticipates a rare look at the severed branch of the Mahmoud family tree.

Materia answers the door. She is wearing a smock. She has a pair of stained scissors in her hand. She’s been cutting kidneys for a pie. Little Frances stands peeking out from behind the foliage of her mother’s crazy floral print. Materia’s gaze has widened over the years, as though she sees more of the world at once than other people do. But although she seems to see more, she does not have the expression of someone who is processing what she sees. She doesn’t look, she stares. Now she’s staring up at Teresa.

Teresa recognizes the look of someone who’s not all there. Teresa would have assumed that the big sad woman in the doorway was the hired help had she not been prepared to spot the Mahmoud family resemblance — discernible in the shade and smoothness of the skin, in Mrs Mahmoud’s eyes veiled in a vague face.

“Mrs Piper?”

Materia nods. Teresa enquires politely, “Is Mr Piper home, ma’am?”

Wee Frances has never seen a black person before. Everyone around her is chalk-white except for her own tan mother. She reaches out to Teresa and touches one of her hands. The one holding the envelope. Teresa smiles down at her. Frances collects the moment and puts it in a safe place with two or three others.

Meanwhile, Materia has muttered something and waved her scissors in the general direction of the shed at the side of the house. Teresa heads for the shed and Frances follows her. Materia returns to her kidneys,
snip, snap
.

Through the crack in the door, Frances sees Teresa hand an envelope to Daddy. Daddy opens the envelope and looks at the contents for quite a while. Then Teresa gets him to write something on a piece of paper that she puts back into her purse. When Teresa comes out of the shed, Frances is lingering nearby.

“What do you want, darlin, hmm? Where’d you get all that pretty yellow hair?”

Frances gazes up by way of an answer. What she wants is everything about this fabulous woman, who is surely a queen from some far-off place. Teresa would laugh if she knew: the Queen of Whitney Pier, dear.

“Here you go, honey.” Teresa hands Frances a piece of rock candy just as —

“Frances!”

The child and the woman look up to see the golden girl step from the taxicab that has pulled up in front of the house. Leo Taylor has an actual automobile now, a Model T Ford with his name stencilled on the side, Leo Taylor Transport. He holds the door open and Kathleen walks past him without a glance. It was she who called out and interrupted the sweet transaction. Now she walks stately towards them and, in cultivated tones, enquires of Teresa, “Can I help you, miss?”

To heck with you, thinks Teresa, “No, Miss Piper, I just dropped something off for your father.”

“Hey, Trese, come on, girl!”

Leo Taylor doesn’t like to linger here. Teresa shakes her head as she climbs into her brother’s cab. The Pipers — living like hillbillies, acting like royalty. They drive away.

“Show me your hand, Frances.”

Frances opens her little hand and reveals the black and white licorice peppermint. A prize. Kathleen takes the sweet and throws it in a high arc across the yard till it lands in the creek with a small plop.

“You know you shouldn’t take candy from strangers, Frances. Especially coloured strangers.”

Lady Liberty

Girl as she was, Claudia looked upon the world before her like some young untried knight
.

CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E
.

Kathleen is truly and utterly and completely Kathleen in New York. That’s what the city does for you if it’s meant for you. She’s got plenty of personality and no history, and she has never breathed so much air in her life. She comes from an Atlantic island surrounded by nothing but sea air, yet in the man-made outdoor corridors of this fantastic city she can finally breathe. This air is what the gods live upon. The gods who get things done. Not the gods who mope on ancient promontories and exhale fossil vapours, waiting for someone to fill in the fragments of forgotten sagas that have come unravelled with age. Those gods have sagged so long on their rocks, they are well on the way to turning to stone themselves.

But the new gods. That bright baritone chorus. They inhabit every steel support, every suspension bridge, every gleaming silver train, all things vertical and horizontal, all glass, gravel and sand. They take big breaths and they make big sounds and with every breath and sound they open up more sky.

When Kathleen steps onto Pier 54, she starts writing the book of her life in her head:
And then she arrived in the New World. She heard the heels of her sensible shoes ring out on the gangplank, and resolved never to be sensible
.

There are a bewildering number of uniformed porters and un-uniformed scamps ready to seize her trunk and make off with it, but Kathleen hauls it to the centre of the terminal and sits on it beneath the big clock, an eye out for her distant cousin, not minding the wait, serenaded by the crowds. It’s clear: the whole world comes to New York City.

Kathleen intends to be the Eleonora Duse of the operatic stage. If anyone can do this, she can: a classically trained girl with modern ideas about holding the mirror up to nature. The born performer’s zeal to leave no heart intact. An engine in her stoked so high it turned her hair red in the womb. Her mixed Celtic-Arab blood and her origins on a scraggly island off the east coast of a country popularly supposed to consist of a polar ice-cap are enough, by American standards, both to cloak her in sufficient diva mystery and to temper the exotic with a dash of windswept North American charm. She’ll refer to pickled moose meat and kippered cod tongues and occasionally swear in Arabic just to get the legend rolling, but she is of the New World, the golden West. She is no Sicilian or Castilian castaway bound for glory, then early ruin. Like them she is going to be great but, unlike them, she is going to survive. She has decided never to stop singing. She will be singing at seventy-five.

She eats a frankfurter in a bun she bought from a fat man with a black moustache who told her the story of his life in broken English. Her life has finally started.

“Kathleen?” Kathleen turns and sees a little spinster lady.

“I’m Giles. Welcome to New York City, dear.”

Giles, to whom Kathleen has been entrusted, has unfaded blue eyes and a genteel apartment in Greenwich Village. Kathleen estimates Giles’s age to be in the vicinity of a hundred and two. In fact Giles is a young sixty. Perhaps, Kathleen speculates, Giles was once a schoolteacher or — better — perhaps Giles is a beneficiary of that vague yet respectable means of support known among English literary heroines as “an annuity”.

Being retired, Giles volunteers at a convent infirmary, where she helps old nuns to die. Her highest qualification for this calling is not her compassion, or her surprisingly strong stomach, or even her piety. It is her unshockability. Giles has lowered her ear to many a withered mouth and heard confessions no priest ever has — for towards the end there is often confusion; a sudden disquiet lest one has after all confessed and repented of the wrong things in life. Ancient sins bloom afresh, fragrant with the purity they possessed a moment before they were named and nipped in the bud. And having listened, Giles may remark, “I know, dear.” Sometimes the dying words come in the form of a question to which Giles may reply, upon reflection, “I wonder that myself, dear, from time to time, truly I do.” But Giles never asks any questions herself.