Fall on Your Knees (22 page)

Mahmoud Mourns

Mahmoud never wants to see Materia or her husband or her children or any evidence of them ever again. The only communication he’s had with the Piper family for the past nineteen years has been the business arrangement with James, and they’ve both done well out of that while never once coming face to face. But that’s over now.

Kathleen was the one Mahmoud invested in, was proud of, but he ought to have known that exposing the girl and her gift to the world was exactly prostitution. She went out and reaped the wages of her parents’ vanity (in the case of James) and stupidity (in the case of Materia) and wound up a tramp. It’s what happens. Where did she do it, who did she let do it to her and how often, who was it, some Anglo dog son-of-an-
enklese
-bitch with no respect for people’s daughters, or worse, a Jew, New York is full with them, or worse, a coloured man — likewise thronging in that city — and once that’s in the blood it sleeps there for generations until you least expect it, where was her father when his daughter was being ruined in the worst city in the world, where people mate like mongrels? And now a bastard in the family, another girl to boot, my son-in-law is truly cursed. Bad from the beginning, bad in the end, I wash my hands.

Mahmoud is enraged to find himself choked with tears as he looks at the lily-white girl in the casket with her copper hair spread out around her. He’s never seen her up close before. And he fumes that they would dare to send her to her grave in white,
in white
they would send her to God who sees all! “And there’s my idiot daughter at the organ. I should have broken her fingers at birth. I should have dismantled the piano and shot the bastard, Piper. I was merciful and look at the result.”

Mahmoud scans Mercedes and Frances sitting scrubbed and gleaming in the pew next to James, who looks positively bleached in his black suit, “If he’s smart he’ll have the older one in a convent and the younger one out of the house and married before her first period, damn them all to hell.”

The Rocking Chair

James takes his last drink on the night of Kathleen’s funeral. It’s after midnight when he comes in from the shed, sits down at the piano in the front room and plays. The opening bars of “Moonlight Sonata” and many other pieces.

Upstairs, Mercedes awakens when the music stops. Frances is not in bed. Mercedes sits up and looks out the window, expecting to see Frances down at the creek again, but no. Mercedes leaves the room and pauses on the landing looking down. There’s a light coming from the front room. And something else coming from the kitchen — a smell. It’s late at night but Mumma’s cooking kidneys for a pie. Daddy’s favourite. Mercedes takes one step down. Two steps. Three. And stops to listen … a little sound like a puppy. Mercedes thinks of the kittens in the creek the other night and shudders. She doesn’t like it when Frances goes roaming in the dark. She wishes everyone would just stay in bed at night. She wishes she were back in her own cosy bed too, but she is the eldest now. Mercedes places her hand lightly on the railing and descends towards the light spilling over the bottom of the stairs. She rounds the archway of the front room and stops.

It’s all right. Frances is alive alive-o. She is in the rocking-chair with Daddy. It’s funny that Frances seems already to have been looking at Mercedes even before Mercedes arrived in the doorway. It’s Daddy making the puppy sound. He is sad because Kathleen died. He needs his other little girls all the more now. Frances is sitting nice and still, not squirming for a change. Mercedes waits until the rocking-chair stops and Frances slides from Daddy’s lap to join her in the doorway. As they walk upstairs hand in hand Frances says, “It doesn’t hurt.” Mercedes says, “I don’t like that smell of kidneys cooking.” And Frances says, “Me neither.”

Back in bed with Frances cuddled once more at her side, Mercedes starts to feel afraid. And a bit sick to her stomach although she can’t understand why. She rises, goes over to the wash-basin and throws up. It must have been that smell of kidneys cooking that got her upset, because why was Mumma making meat pies in the night? And are there really places where people put children into pies and eat them? It’s a sin to think that about Mumma. But Mercedes can’t help it. She knows there couldn’t really be a baby in the pie, but she also knows that whenever she loses track of Frances, bad things happen.

The First Holy Sacrament

“Daddy, where’s Mumma?”

“I need you to be a big girl, Mercedes.”

The first thing James did after dragging Materia’s body up to the bedroom was run and get the priest — not for Materia, too late for her — for the baby girl. James has caught on: there is a God. There is a Devil — necessary evil. You may be cursed, but at least God has a plan for you.

The alternative to believing is buckling under the weight of irredeemable guilt and the meaninglessness that used to be your free will; ceasing to function; and that is not an option. He has a family of motherless children depending on him.

He sent the priest on ahead, then ran for the doctor.

The baby girl is on fire with poliomyelitis. Or “infantile paralysis”. You don’t have to be an infant to get it.

The house is quarantined. It doesn’t make much difference, there never having been many comings or goings. But now it’s official. The doctor has taken his pot of black paint and slapped an X on the front door as he has on so many others. Every day, people spit on their thresholds front and back, declaring, “No disease in my house!” but the charm has lost its power. There’s disease everywhere.

Stealing centre stage from the regular cast of diphtheria, TB, scarlet fever and typhus is Spanish influenza. You don’t have to be Spanish to get it. In 1918 and ’19 the flu kills millions more people world-wide than the war did. Many believe the disease spread from the rats that fed off the corpses in the trenches.

The graveyard has sprouted afresh with little white crosses carved with cuddlesome lambs. Children have been hit particularly hard. Mercedes has just finished first grade. She goes to Our Lady of Mount Carmel School and up until the summer holidays she had to wear a white surgical mask to class like all the other children, so as not to spread germs. “Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick, so she called up the doctor to be quick, quick, quick.” All through town, groceries are left at the bottom of front yards along with the milk, no one wants to get near. Even doctors and nurses are dropping like flies. Coal deliveries are carefully monitored: if a coal cart delivers a load you never ordered, look out, someone’s going to leave your house in a box. If a black horse stops in front of your house for no reason, start praying. If a white horse comes in the night, forget it.

The doctor stands on one side of James, looking into the crib. The priest stands on the other. He is wearing his vestments and holding cruets of holy water and oil. James has no idea that the infant has already been baptized. He doesn’t know that’s what Frances was doing out there in the creek, he just knows she’s bad. As for the night of Kathleen’s funeral — well, he won’t be touching another drop of anything stronger than tea from now on.

The priest will baptize the baby without picking her up because to move her at this point in her illness would be very dangerous. He asks James, “Who will stand as godfather for the child?”

“I will,” says James, since there’s no one else but the doctor in the quarantined house, and he’s a Protestant.

The Holy Roman Church has been waiting for James all along. He thinks back to his own forced baptism years ago when he married Materia. He stood defiantly with his head unbowed while a priest mumbled words over him, “The voice of the Lord is mighty. The voice of the Lord is majestic. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon….” He endured it as a sham. But now he knows there are no accidents, only tests. The Church is full of examples of men like him, who thought themselves damned and yet were saved. Men equal parts monster and martyr. And through one last act — perhaps occurring invisibly and deep within the heart at the hour of death — they were saved. Even sainted.

“And who will stand as godmother?” enquires the priest.

James opens the door to where Mercedes is waiting. He has her stay on the threshold, well back from the seething crib. Mercedes’ hair is freshly though unevenly braided, she’s not yet used to doing it herself. A blue gingham pinafore, stockings of red because blue and red match.

The priest doesn’t flinch. In the eyes of the Church a child can stand as sponsor in an emergency, and besides, it is fairly clear this baby will soon be with God.

Godparents must promise that, should anything happen to the child’s parents, they will bring the child up in the Roman Catholic faith. This is usually a hypothetical vow, but not for Mercedes because Mumma is already dead. “I’m the mother now,” she tells herself. “And I’ve had my confirmation so I’m ready.” Last May Mercedes put on an immaculate white dress and veil and, along with the rest of her shiny clean classmates, was ritually slapped by the bishop. Three of her classmates have since died. Dottie Duggan died, she sat next to Mercedes. Dottie had the disgusting habits of eating glue and picking her nose, but now she is one of God’s angels. Mercedes chose Saint Catherine of Siena as her saint’s name even though she badly wanted Bernadette, but Bernadette isn’t a saint yet, when oh when? Frances told Mercedes to take Veronica as her saint’s name because of Veronica’s magic hanky. “Not magic, Frances. Miracle.”

The priest leans over the crib where the infant lies on its little bed of coals and he asks it,
“Quo nomine vocaris
?”

In the doorway, Mercedes and James answer together on behalf of the baby, “Lily.”

James hasn’t thought of a middle name. There hasn’t been time. He just prays that she’ll grow up to use this one.

The priest continues, “Lily,
quid petis ab Ecclesia Dei?”

Mercedes and James reply, “Faith.” They have a special dispensation to reply in English because Mercedes is too young to have learned all that Latin — though she would have tried had there been time.

Mercedes is longing for a look at her new baby sister. She watches as the priest bends down and blows softly three times into the crib. He is blowing away the unclean spirit to make room for the Holy Spirit. The Consoler.

“Exorcizo te, immunde spiritus … maledicte diabole.”

The priest spends a long time blessing Lily and praying over her. Mercedes and James say the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. And then the priest resumes his questions. “Lily,
abrenuntias satanae?”

“I do renounce him.”

“Et omnibus operibus eius?”

“I do renounce them.”

The priest anoints Lily’s head with oil as the godparents attest to her faith in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Finally, he sprinkles holy water onto the burning forehead. It beads into the oil and simmers there as he baptizes her,
“in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
.”

When the priest turns to Mercedes, she trembles with the gravity of the moment and hands James the precious white satin bundle she has been holding neatly folded in her arms. It is the family baptismal gown. James takes the gown over to the priest. Lily is too sick to wear it, so the priest merely lays it over her and tells her to accept this white garment, and never to allow it to become stained.

Thus, along with her father, and at the age of almost seven, Mercedes assumes responsibility for the soul of Lily Piper.

Now it’s the doctor’s turn. He peers into the crib, shakes his head, gives James the it’s-in-God’s-hands-now look, pats Mercedes on the shoulder and leaves with the priest.

Babes in the Wood

“Frances,” said Mercedes, handing her a mug of cocoa, “Mumma’s gone away.”

“Where?”

“To God.”

The graveyard was scary even though it was a sunny day with a breeze off the water. They watched Mumma’s coffin go into the ground. They each threw down some dirt. It made them feel a bit funny doing that — it didn’t seem like a very nice thing to do. Kathleen’s grave was right next to Mumma’s. Kathleen is down there, thought Mercedes and Frances — although Mercedes tried to remind herself that Kathleen was not down there, she was with God. Frances was very worried about Kathleen — it’s dark down there. How can she breathe? Is she scared of the other dead people? Most of them are skeletons by now. Are there worms?

Afterwards they went home and Daddy took a steak-and-kidney pie out of the ice-box and heated it in the oven. How could it be that Mumma’s cooking was on the table when Mumma was in the ground? James ate, but the little girls couldn’t touch a bite. They tried to stop breathing until they were allowed to leave the table. Frances tried not to picture Mumma cutting raw kidneys with the scissors.
The snip-snap
sound.

That night of Mumma’s funeral they couldn’t sleep. They crept out of bed and knelt outside the door to Kathleen’s old bedroom, where their new baby sister lay. How many Lilys can there be in one family, Mercedes asked herself. Frances was worried; babies called Lily lay perfectly still, then were taken away. Daddy called her Lily because of something I did, thought Frances. It’s to remind me. Of something. They prayed.

“Angel of God, my guardian dear, please save our baby sister, amen.”

They sang to her:

“‘Oh playmate! Come out and play with me. And bring your dollies three, climb up my apple tree. Shout down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door, and we’ll be jolly friends for ever more…. ’”

And they told her all the nice things they would do together when she got well.

“We’ll have candy for breakfast,” promised Frances.

“We’ll join the choir,” Mercedes pledged.

“We’ll put on a beautiful ballgown.”

“We’ll cook lovely things for Daddy.”

“We promise, Lily.”