Fall on Your Knees (23 page)

“We swear.”

“On our graves.”

“On our bones.”

“On our kidneys.” Which made them burst out laughing and Daddy called upstairs for them to go straight to bed, which made them both start whisper-singing at the very same time, “‘The doctor sighed and he shook his head, and he said, Miss Polly put her straight to bed! ’”

Mercedes tucked Frances in with her favourite doll, a beautiful flamenco dancer in a red dress. Frances made the doll dance quietly for a while. She made her go home and make molasses cookies for her children. “Now be good,” said the dancer to her children, “I am going to study. And afterwards, if I’m not too tired, maybe we will go to the Old Country.
Inshallah.”
After a while Frances said, “Mercedes?”

“What?”

“What if Daddy dies?”

“Daddy’s not going to die, Frances.”

“We would be orphans.”

“Daddy’s not going to die.”

But Frances was crying, her twinkly face all crumpled, her tears hot like hot water from the kettle.

“Frances, I wouldn’t let you be an orphan.”

“I don’t want Daddy to die,” Frances sobbed, inconsolable because of poor Daddy, his two little girls lost in the woods with leaves for a blanket and no food. She cried because of the kind birds and the sad squirrels and poor Daddy can’t save his dear children. It was the warmest she’d been in days.

“Frances, I wouldn’t let you be an orphan.”

Frances was crying so hard now that Mercedes got worried.

“I want my Mumma to come ba-a-a-a-ack.”

Mercedes stroked Frances’s fuzzy braids and whispered tenderly, “It’s all right, baby, Mumma’s here.”

Frances stopped crying.

“I’m your mumma now,” said Mercedes.

Frances lay still for a while, then she said, “No you’re not.”

“Yes I am, sweetheart.”

Frances curled up into a tight ball.

“Mumma’s here,” Mercedes cooed, “Mumma’s here.”

Frances hugged her knees till her bones met one another. She turned her limbs into strong little tree branches. She made her spine into a springy switch and her skin into new bark. Not crying.

Frances never cried for Mumma after that night.

“It’s a good thing Mumma’s gone,” Frances would say to herself, going over and over in her mind all the terrible things she couldn’t quite recall — weaving the threads together into an ingenious cloak of motley. “Because if Mumma were here, she would know what a bad girl I’ve been.”

Lily Who Lived

The morning after Materia’s funeral dawns joyfully. James says to Mercedes, “Come and see your godchild.” Frances follows. They walk into the sick-room, now stripped of everything but the glorious sunlight pouring through the open window, bathing the crib in a dazzle of dust sprites. Frances and Mercedes approach and look through the bars. Daddy beams. The little girls expect to see a plump and peachy version of their doll babies, but lying there is a thin-cheeked thing under a mass of black hair that looks like a fright wig. Dark eyes full of intense and watchful concern — they seem to have seen plenty already.

“What’s wrong with her?” asks Frances.

“Nothing, she’s perfect,” says James.

She looks like a golliwog, thinks Mercedes, and Frances says, “There is so something wrong with her.”

For which she gets a clip on the ear.

Mercedes says, “She’s beautiful,” and makes a mental note to confess the lie.

James picks the baby up. “She’s a prize-fighter.”

Frances follows Daddy and the baby and Mercedes downstairs. They’re going to feed her now. Coming from the kitchen is sweet tinkly music. They enter to see a six-inch porcelain girl revolving on the table. She wears kid button-boots and a lime-green silk dress over several petticoats, and holds a yellow and white parasol over her golden ringlets. On the base is an inscription,
An Old-Fashioned Girl
. It’s for Mercedes, “For being such a good grown-up girl.”

“Oh Daddy, thank you.”

Frances is pleased, happy that there is happiness in the house.

“It can be both of ours, Frances.”

“No, it’s your special thing, Mercedes.”

Mercedes lets Frances wind it up, “Careful, not too tight.”

Frances treats it reverently, but can’t suppress a craving to know what makes the music.

The baby lies limp but alert in Mercedes’ arms while James feeds her milk from a dropper. He says, “She’s going to be fine. It’s a miracle.”

I am holding a miracle, thinks Mercedes.

“There is so something wrong with her,” says Frances under her breath.

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…

Making love with the New Yorker is an experience which announces to Kathleen that the present tense has finally begun. It’s summer now. For Kathleen the Present is a new country, unassailable by the old countries because the Goths and Vandals of the old countries don’t even know the Present exists. But it is assailable. It will be breached. Kathleen is too young to know that. Right now, in summer, she is making love. She is just being born.

My love
I love you
Oh
Sweet honey
I love you
Sweet, oh
Oh

It’s a first-love conversation. Mouths can’t kiss each other enough or find enough of the beloved to be kissed enough. The invisible ocean holds the room and the bed and the lovers suspended and treats them like aquatic plants, arms can never stop moving, fronds in the liquid breeze, hands never stop waving slowly side to side, caressing the loved one,
hello …
fingers never stop fanning, tendrils in a ceaseless bouquet, all parts sway and sway sometimes violently sometimes almost not at all. A small grazing gesture ignites the need for closer, and breaks the surface of the water,
never in you enough
, gulping air,
never contain you enough
, on dry land now,
never hold you enough
, the desert heat,
drink you, oasis lover shimmering under a palm, I will burn to ashes here then blow away
— until that merciful peak is discovered, and once that is discovered, the slow tumble back down the hill, buckets of water spilling in slow motion, streaking the sand along their way until again the gentle sway, the ocean floor, the grazing touch that reignites the sea.

I want you
want you to
want you too
want to
oh you
so, so
sweet
Oh
Oh
like honey
I love you
taste like honey
my love

That fall James got a letter. He went down there and brought Kathleen home the day the war ended.

across the ocean wide and wild….

Book 3

T
HE
S
HOEMAKER AND HIS
E
LVES

Bootleg

1925. April Fool’s Day — although Frances never needs an excuse. She and Lily are playing in the attic surrounded by a rabble of dolls. The room is otherwise empty except for the hope chest. Lily is going on six. Frances is eleven. She is Lily’s self-appointed babysitter, playmate and tormentor. Lily wouldn’t have it any other way.

Lily no longer resembles the strange baby she was. The only trace is in the particular attentiveness of her lovely green eyes, as though always prepared to take in a solemn truth. This is a quality that Frances especially enjoys. Lily’s black hair has acquired an auburn sheen and, although nowadays a lot of little girls and boys have Buster Brown haircuts, Lily’s hair falls down past her waist when loose. Her skin is peaches and cream and honey, she looks to have been kissed by the sun even in winter. She has lips like Rose Red, and an adorable little bump that appears in her forehead when she is perturbed. Frances has told her it is a horn that will soon grow out through the skin.

Today Lily is dolled up in a frilly knee-length dress of light green taffeta with a crinoline — no special occasion, just because she is our darling sweet Lily and Daddy likes to see her prettily turned out. Most girls, both little and big, have long since renounced crinolines and petticoats — women no longer need all that nonsense tripping them up, they’ve had far too much to do since the war. But Lily doesn’t have to do anything but be happy.

Today, as usual, she wears a gleaming crown of french braids scraped so tight by Mercedes that the corners of her eyes are slightly stretched. Mercedes is in charge of Lily’s hair, but Lily doesn’t like anyone but Frances to dress her or give her a bath. That’s just the way it is. Even though Lily never knows when Frances will do or say something alarming — “Honest, Lily, you were adopted. We just found you in the garbage one day. You had potato peelings stuck all over you.”

Frances is a wiry girl. And white as a sheet, usually. Except for the freckle on her Roman nose. And except for when she is laughing, or thinking up something really good. Then the bits of green glass in her hazel eyes light up, her nose goes pink and a little white stripe appears across its bridge. Lily watches Frances’s nose as a sailor might watch for a lighthouse beam. When the stripe appears, it means Frances is about to go overboard.

And what has become of Frances’s beautiful dark blonde curls? They have given way to an invasion of wild undergrowth. “Naturally curly” is a euphemism. In brilliant sunlight it is possible to catch a hint of the blonde halo she used to wear. Otherwise it has been obliterated by a riot of rust and brassy browns. Frances wears her hair in braids too, just like Lily and Mercedes, although hers writhe with escape-artist locks that by the end of the day bounce free. She cuts her own bangs.

Mercedes doesn’t much care for dolls any more, but Lily is passionate about them and so is Frances. She still has all her dolls from when she was little. When the dolls are not sleeping on the bed, they live in the attic. At the moment, they are all nicely lined up against the hope chest: there is Maurice, the organ-grinder’s monkey; there is Scarlet Fever, the girl baby with the porcelain head; there is Diphtheria Rose, whose velvet dress Frances has shortened fashionably; there are the twin sailors, Typhoid and TB Ahoy, and the little boy doll, Small Pox. There used to be a lovely lady doll in a ballgown, Cholera La France, but she got lost somewhere. In pride of place is the flamenco dancer with her crimson dress and castanets. Spanish Influenza.

Lily reveres Frances’s dolls, but the one she loves with all her heart is her very own Raggedy-Lily-of-the-Valley. Mrs Luvovitz made her and Lily named her in honour of Frances’s favourite perfume. She has lovely thick brown woollen locks, perfect for braiding, except where Frances gave her a bit of a haircut. Today, Lily takes Raggedy-Lily-of-the-Valley and picks the mouth off her for no reason. Regret is bitter and instantaneous. But what is to be done now?

“You’ve wrecked her,” observes Frances.

“No I haven’t.”

“You sure have, here, give her to me.”

“What are you going to do to her?”

“I’m going to fix her.”

“Don’t wreck her.”

“She’s already wrecked.”

Lily hands over the rag doll.

“It’s okay Lily, we can just pretend she had leprosy —”