Fall on Your Knees (17 page)

All of which makes Giles a pretty poor chaperone for a young champion like Kathleen.

That first night in Giles’s guest-room, which overlooks the roofs of the Village and affords a view of the tallest buildings on earth, Kathleen opens a fresh new Holy Angels notebook and writes on the virgin page:

8 pm, February 29, 1918, New York City
Dear Diary …

She keeps her appointment the next day, at the corner of 64th Street and Central Park West in a fifth-floor studio. It is a room of excellent posture. There is a Frenchified sofa that is apparently not for sitting. To the right of the door stands a bust of Verdi atop a marble column. To the left is Mozart. On the gleaming parquet floor, a Persian carpet. A high coffered ceiling in mahogany, a giant window onto the park, a grand piano. An immaculate wheat-coloured man with a goatee, morning coat, tapered trousers and striped cravat. The maestro. From somewhere in Europe. Brief introductions, she is not invited to be seated, she is instructed to sing something.

She does.

It’s a small room. It’s a big voice.

The maestro’s gaze alights on a corner of the carpet, disinterested as an insect, and stays there for the duration of the song. Kathleen finishes. The maestro glances up and perceives the flush on her face, the moist glistening of her eye, the pulse at her neck, her lips still parted. And he says in a wafer-thin voice, “We have a lot of work to do.”

Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels of grand opera. The maestro smells all this on Kathleen and cools his blood to a temperature undetectable by wild animals. Before him lies a gruelling task. It is so much easier to shape competence. Yet, in a small spot beneath the hardest part of his skull, the maestro is feverish with excitement. You don’t get a student like this every day — perhaps two in a lifetime. He prepares to show her no mercy.

As Kathleen works harder and harder, she walks farther and farther. Between sadistic singing lessons with the maestro and suffocatingly sedate suppers with Giles, Kathleen walks the length and breadth of the Island of Manhattan. From the East River to the Hudson; from Battery Park to the Haarlem River.

One day, a girl is sitting at the maestro’s grand piano when Kathleen drags herself up to the studio. She is Rose, in a pale pink dress perfect for a dear little thing with an open face and a trusting nature, and therefore all wrong on Rose.

Rose is an extremely good pianist, but Kathleen doesn’t notice that at first, for two reasons. First, because when you’re training with a famous bastard in New York City, with one eye on the Met and the other on obscurity, you don’t notice the quality of the piano accompaniment during your lesson unless it is incompetent. But this pianist is doubly inaudible because she is black and therefore outside any system that nurtures and advances a classical virtuosa. So Kathleen thinks of Rose not as a pianist but as an accompanist.

When Rose looks at Kathleen the first time, she sees a daughter of fortune and looks back down at her piano keys. When she looks the second time it is to verify that the sound that just filled the room really came from that milk-fed thing standing on the carpet. The voice is worth considering. The singer can go to hell.

“The piano is out of tune,” says Kathleen.

Ordinarily, Kathleen says nothing during her lessons. She makes the sounds the maestro orders her to make and, in the privacy of her own mind, thinks up a thousand devastating retorts with which to slay him. But today she is impelled to speak, because what’s the good of an accompanist if she can’t even hear when the piano is off key? Kathleen has addressed her observation to the maestro, but Rose addresses Kathleen, “The piano is perfectly in tune. You’re flat.”

Kathleen glares at the accompanist, with equal parts fury and disbelief. And the accompanist looks back — calm, level gaze. Insolent, more like it, how dare she? Handsome features cut like sculpture into her face, so at odds with the puffed sleeves and schoolgirl braids. Kathleen looks away dismissively from the beanpole in a hand-me-down dress. She expects the maestro to scold the accompanist or, preferably, fire her. But instead he turns to Kathleen. “Perhaps if you were less intent upon making noise, and more intent upon listening, you might learn to hear the difference between that” — the maestro jabs at a piano key — “and this” — the maestro makes a horrible honking sound through his nose, supposedly in imitation of Kathleen.

Kathleen floods crimson. The maestro instructs her coolly, “Lesson One: The Scale.”
Lesson One!
Kathleen takes a breath and steadies herself for the giant step backwards. She pictures a shining sword sharp at both edges, and sings the scale, pondering all the while who is worse: Sister Saint Monica, or this singing teacher whom she has come to think of as the Kaiser. And before she is halfway through the scale, she decides: the accompanist is worse.

Rose plays the scale and watches the singer. Decides she is not white, not even red. But green. Faintly visible, called up by outrage, are the veins at her wrists, neck, temple. This is the only physical detail that corroborates the voice, which Rose knows to be not of human origin. The green must be seaweed. Rose allows her mind to wander in this way whenever she is required to play in harness. It helps take the sting from the bit. Rose has no need of fancy when she plays her own music, because there is no difference between her own music and her mind. All alone after hours in a second-storey church in Haarlem, far north of this studio. Free rein.

But for now: Lesson One —
La Scala
. Kathleen glowers at the accompanist. Rose blinks at the singer and allows the slightest bit of curiosity to mingle with scorn.

It’s 1918. New York City is inching towards the centre of the universe. Its streets throng with working girls and doughboys and the gumption of immigrants from the four corners of the earth. Kathleen is sorely tempted to cut her classes, her hair and her hems. She has forgotten all about the “fashionable New York” of
Harper’s Bazaar
. She is consumed by the new New York, which is more various and fabulous at two in the afternoon on Mulberry Street than come midnight at the Ziegfield Follies. In Manhattan’s north end Rose plays her own music, while outside her church window Haarlem is turning into Harlem. Rose’s mother has raised her to be an example to The Race, and every day the list of places Rose must never set foot in grows longer. But Kathleen is subject to no such restrictions. Her father is far away, and Giles asks no questions except to enquire, “How are you enjoying New York, dear?”

First Kathleen fell in love with New York. Then she fell in love with a New Yorker. It happened very quickly, the way things are supposed to happen when you move from New Waterford to New York at eighteen.

The Children’s Hour

At home, James slows down a bit. With Kathleen gone, it’s safe for him to spend an after-supper hour in the wingback chair again. In the corner of the front room sit two unopened crates of books, but there are still so many unread in the glass cabinet that James leaves the crates untouched. There will be time enough later, when Kathleen is launched in her career and he doesn’t have to work so hard. Fifty-two books, not counting the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. One day, I’ll sit down with all my books around me, and just start reading.

Right now, however, there’s still too much work to do. What’s more, James has taken to devoting his precious evening hour to his two little girls, whom he has noticed for the first time. He is pleased to find they’re bright, the both of them, and he reproves himself for having simply handed them over to Materia until now. He intends to make it up to them. To this end, one evening soon after Kathleen’s departure James calls the two wee ones over to the wingback chair, tucks them in one on either side, opens a big book and reads, “‘In the second century of the Christian era the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind.’” And the little girls listen, bewildered by the strange names and long words but enchanted by Daddy’s careful voice, by glimpses of wonderful worlds that unfold at his command and, most of all, by his special attention.

It is different from the thrill they experienced with Kathleen. With Daddy they are aware of something rare and solemn. They understand that he is teaching them. And they respond with as much reverence as they can muster.

Mercedes is almost six. She never fails to bring Daddy his tea, balancing it carefully along with the evening’s book. She is a good child who takes her role as Mumma’s helper and Frances’s big sister very seriously — although it looks likely she’ll turn out on the plain side, her hair a bit mousy. Nonetheless she has nice brown eyes and a good disposition. But James can’t help being particularly taken with Frances. She’s a live one, going on five, with her burnished gold ringlets and mischievous grin, green lights dancing in her hazel eyes. Always ready with a joke for Daddy: “I’ve got your nose!” And full of good ideas for games that she and Mercedes can play. “Mercedes, let’s shave!” “Mercedes, know what? These buttons can fit in our noses.” Mercedes has learned by trial and error when to say, “Okay,” and when to say, “Let’s pretend.”

James doesn’t like the sound of Materia and the children chattering in Arabic but he doesn’t object. He simply counters with the special time they spend together after supper. He leavens the weight of classics with fairy-tales and rhymes. The girls love poems and learn them easily. Standing at the foot of his chair holding hands, neat as two pins in Kathleen’s old frocks — blue for Mercedes, red for Frances — their button boots so nicely shined, they recite in piping singsong voices: “‘I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.’”

Then Frances squeals with glee and Mercedes curtsies. James smiles and claps. Frances scrambles onto his knee, Mercedes lays her cheek against his hand and James feels the ice in his chest breaking up. The war is finally over. He is home again, and everything is turning out all right after all.

I have you fast in my fortress
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you for ever,
Yes for ever and a day
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin
And moulder in dust away.

There are fewer letters from Kathleen than James would like, but now and then Giles sends a card assuring him that all is well. In June, a package arrives from Kathleen containing twin sailor-boy dolls, one for Frances and one for Mercedes. They are thrilled and immediately take the new additions to meet the rest of their doll family, “Look, children, these are your new American cousins.” There is also a letter and James calls his girls to the wingback chair and reads it aloud.

“‘Dear Daddy and Mumma and young ladies,

I am making wonderful progress under the expert tutelage of my voice teacher. He could not be better pleased, and neither could I. Giles is a wonderful companion and she has introduced me to a number of quite inspiring cultural experiences. To date, I have enjoyed excursions to the Museum of Natural History, as well as theatrical evenings of modern dance. There is also a good deal of modern music being premièred in Manhattan, and it is a privilege to be among the first to hear such ground-breaking compositions. There are also numerous soldiers passing through on their way to the Front, and I plan to assist Giles in wrapping bandages — although I cannot claim any great skill with knitting-needles and would pity the poor soldier who received a pair of socks from me! These diversions aside, my time is almost entirely caught up with lessons and practice, practice, practice. Please say hello to Sister Saint Cecilia if you happen to see her in town. I will write again soon.

Love, Kathleen’”

Content, James folds the letter and tucks it into his breast pocket. Then he tells Frances and Mercedes once again about how, when Kathleen finishes her schooling, they will take the train to New York City and hear her sing at The Metropolitan Opera House. Mercedes pictures a white palace, and Kathleen sitting on a throne next to a handsome prince. Frances sees a castle with mermaids swimming in a moat full of ginger beer, and Kathleen holding a sword, singing on a balcony.

The summer flies past. Materia cooks, James works, the little girls thrive. By fall, they can read. It has happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy’s lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, there comes a day when they no longer have to pretend. The glass of the mirror has simply melted away and now they are free to enter as many worlds as they like, together or alone. Thank you, Daddy.

On November 7, James walks to the post office with his girls to find a letter from New York waiting for him. There is his usual pleasure at the sight of the postmark, but it is followed today by slight surprise, for there is no return address and his own name and address are written in a ladylike but unknown hand. While Frances and Mercedes scrupulously divide a shoestring of licorice, James opens the letter and reads….