Fall on Your Knees (71 page)

Frances Euphrasia Piper
Died April 25, 1953
Age 40

“We have loved her in life. Let us not abandon her, until we have conducted her by our prayers into the house of the Lord.” ST. AMBROSE

Solace Art. Co. - 202 E. 44th St. N.Y.

Sister Saint Eustace attends. Mr MacIsaac attends. Mrs Luvovitz attends, she is a widow now. Ralph and an altar boy carry the coffin. Teresa meant to keep a low profile but it’s difficult amid so few people. Mercedes pointedly ignores her — don’t come to me asking for forgiveness. Among Frances’s absent former cohorts there is surprise — not that she up and died, but that “I thought she died years ago.”

At the cemetery, Mrs Luvovitz bends and places fresh flowers on Materia’s grave, as is her habit. Benny is buried at the far end in a little patch blessed by a rabbi from away. Mrs Luvovitz comes and chats to Benny every day when she’s not in Montreal.

Ralph helps his mother back to her feet. Mercedes finds the sight of him indescribably sad. He is almost bald. He has a paunch and a foolish smile. Ralph is happy. He is an obstetrician. He loves his family and he survived the war. The second one. When it broke out, he joined up as a medical officer. He promised his mother he would not fight and he didn’t — although by 1936 it was clear to Mrs Luvovitz that, although she had always considered herself a German, Germany no longer considered her so. Nonetheless, she armed Ralph with a slew of addresses of relatives in Germany and Poland. Ralph spent the aftermath of the war treating people in DP camps and it was there that he came to realize that the addresses his mother had given him were of no use.

Now Mrs Luvovitz squeezes her son’s arm and remembers birthing the woman who is being buried today. Born with the caul. Mrs Luvovitz looks at the sea and thinks, when did this become my home? When I buried Benny here? When the second war came? She cannot discern the moment. She just knows that every time she returns to Cape Breton, she feels in her bones, this is my home. That is why she has declined to move permanently to Montreal. She spends half the year there. She loves her daughter-in-law, would you believe? And her five grandchildren who are only each perfect. They speak French at home, English at school and Yiddish with every second shopkeeper. Real Canadians.

Mrs Luvovitz watches the casket being lowered into the ground and says a prayer for the wild girl. She was smart. Maybe the smartest. What happened? I should have done something. Gone over there. He didn’t deserve to have daughters, there was something wrong there…. Mrs Luvovitz looks east at the horizon and reminds herself of what she has learned: that nothing in life is not mixed. That it is something to know where your dead are buried. That they are buried. Little Frances.
Aleiha Ha’ Shalom
.

Dirt hits the casket. Mercedes listens. She watches the ocean. She will go on teaching, of course. Pray for the souls of her loved ones, for their speedy release from purgatory into heaven. But who will be left to pray for her? To speed her reunion with her sister? No one, thinks Mercedes. Hopeless.

Hope is a gift. You can’t choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain. Mercedes watches the ocean. Chill green today, and rough. Purple farther out. She wonders when it was that she began to despair. All these years she mistook it for pious resignation. Now she sees the difference. Such a fine line between a state of grace and a state of mortal sin. What is the good of believing fervently in God if you wind up hating Him? How long have I hated God, Mercedes wonders. When did I first believe it was all up to me?

Which are the sins against hope?

The sins against hope are presumption and despair
.

What is despair?

Despair is the loss of hope in God’s mercy
.

Mercedes says to herself, “I am damned.”

Her face has eroded to shale, her brown eyes are dry with sorrow. The ocean sorely tempts her like a lover — she longs to shave her body and walk stinging into salt, naked and anonymous, battered and embraced by rage, nothing personal. Drown. The word is melodious. Beckoning.

Standing back from the grave-site, Teresa looks at Mercedes looking at the ocean and starts to pray for her. For the sake of the girl in the ground. Teresa stays and prays until everyone but she and Mercedes have left the grave and night has begun to fall. Finally Mercedes hesitates … then turns away, and walks home instead of into the ocean.

That night, the Virgin Mary tells her what to do.

Sudden Light

I have been here before
,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door
,
The sweet keen smell
,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore
.

“SUDDEN LIGHT”
BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Rose is sixty-five. Ancient for a jazzman. Rock ’n’ roll reigns and there are fewer gigs now. She has attained that thankless high status, to wit: Doc Rose is the jazz pianist most often cited by famous jazz pianists as their favourite jazz pianist. Knowledge of Doc Rose is a litmus test of connoisseurship. The records are hard to come by now and cherished by those in the know. The rarefied fan club knows everything about Doc Rose except that he and his manager live hand to mouth on 135th Street.

Lily cleans churches, including the one on the second floor. Rose plays chess and checkers on the corner with the other old men. Lily has never cut her hair. It hangs down to her knees, streaked with grey. There are lightweight aluminum braces available nowadays, but she never thought to buy one when they had the money. Her face is fallen but still sweet, her eyes the same. She is forty-five.

It’s just after eight on Sunday night. They’re watching “The Ed Sullivan Show” on television when the knock comes at the door. Lily opens it and Anthony smiles, embarrassed.

“Hello. Miss Piper?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know me, although we actually have the same name, I knew your sister, Miss Mercedes Piper. My name is Anthony Piper.”

Lily looks at the young man. Rose doesn’t take her eyes off Topo Gigio while growling out the side of her mouth, “Someone cack and leave us money?”

“I, no, I don’t think so, heh.”

“Then go away.”

Eddie, kees me goodnight
.

Lily says to him, “Aloysius.”

Anthony says, “I beg your pardon?” convinced now of his mistake, wrong apartment, a senile old couple, ancient smell of cabbage….

Lily says, “Come in.”

He says, “You are Lily Piper?”

“That’s right.”

“In or out, make a decision,” Rose is beginning to enjoy herself.

He steps in. What a day. His first time in New York City. Subway to the black metropolis so strange and familiar, he belongs everywhere and nowhere. Anthony has experienced the feeling before — no matter where he is, there is something about people’s struggles to keep their memories that bruises his heart, because it’s too soft too break. The world is his orphanage. Why he should feel so sorry for the other people on the planet is a mystery to him. He’s actually a very happy person. It’s just that he doesn’t know there’s a difference between love and empathy, nor does he question why he should be overcome so frequently with nostalgia for times and places not his own. He can’t see differences. Only variety. He travels well.

The soft heart feeds a wire frame that is never still. He plays spoons, fiddle, mouth harp, and is learning the bones from a man called Wild Archie — odd, Archie came out of an orphanage too — whom he met at the Cape Breton Club in Halifax. Anthony is wearing desert boots, white jeans, a black turtleneck and an Afro. Slim and eager, a bright penny. Green lights in his hazel eyes.

“You grew up to be happy,” says Lily.

He looks at her more closely, not trusting his sense that he’s met her before, which happens to him so often. As does the reverse. So familiar.

“I guess you must know,” he says carefully, “Miss Piper passed away. Quite recently.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

Lily mourned Frances long ago, on the night she left, but she never imagined Mercedes dying, although she has prayed for her soul every night.

“I’m sorry,” he hands Lily his handkerchief.

“That’s all right … she was my sister….”

“I don’t know what you’re blubbering for,” snarks Rose, “she tried to have you extradited.”

“Exorcized.”

Where am I, thinks Anthony, and who are these people?

Lily blows her nose, “Aloysius, did you know Frances? Did Frances ever get to see you?”

“Actually, my name is Anthony. Um — Frances who?”

“What do you do for a living, Tony?” Rose probing for a percentage.

“I’m a musician —”

“Shit,” shifting back to the TV.

“— and I teach ethnomusicology.”

Rose turns up the volume. Another damn rock ’n’ roll band from England.

Anthony is not giving up. “I should explain that Miss Piper more or less adopted me from afar, if you know what I mean, and when she died she left me her house, and she asked me to —”

“Any money?” Rose’s last attempt.

“No. I think she spent all her money on me. I don’t know why. She was a nice lady.”

“Our Lady of Lourdes,” says Lily.

Our Lady of Loonies, thinks Anthony, instantly contrite, can’t help the things that pop into his head, his love of humanity notwithstanding.

“The cocoa tin,” says Lily.

Cuckoo, thinks Anthony. Then he remembers his errand. He opens his knapsack and takes out a sealed cardboard tube. “When Miss Piper died, she left me a note with your name and address, and instructions for me to give you this personally.”

He hands the tube to Lily. She breaks the seal at one end and withdraws a paper scroll. She spreads it out on the table.

Anthony asks, “What is it?”

“It’s the family tree,” Lily says. “Look. We’re all in it.”

Rose flicks off the TV, scuffs over on her dilapidated slippers, fishes for her glasses.

“See?” Lily tells Anthony. “You have quite a few brothers and sisters. Your father’s still alive, although, oh that’s too bad, your stepmother Adelaide is gone.”

“‘Leo (Ginger) Taylor,’” he reads aloud.

“That’s your father, dear. And your Aunt Teresa too, she’s still living according to this — and look, you have a cousin too. ‘Adele Claire’.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There you are, there.”

Lily points to the issue of Frances Euphrasia and Leo (Ginger). Sprouting from the union of their branches is his name in green ink, “Anthony (Aloysius)”.

Ambrose is there too, twinned with Lily, and under his name the words “died at birth”. Brother and sister hang by a twig from a branch that joins James to Kathleen. Rose looks at Lily. But Lily just folds her hands.

Next to Kathleen, an “equals” sign joins her name to Rose’s. Rose takes off her glasses.

It could be the stale air, the reeling sense of the familiar awash with the foreign, the ocean finally giving up her dead — Anthony is suddenly seasick.

“Sit down,” says Lily.

He drops to his haunches and puts his head between his knees. Lily gets a cool wet cloth from the kitchen and places it on the back of his neck.

“Breathe,” she says.

He does.

That’s better.

“What the hell is ethnomusicology?” Rose wanders off to the piano.

Anthony stands up carefully. “Sorry —”

“Here, dear,” says Lily, “sit down and have a cuppa tea till I tell you about your mother.”

THE END

Permissions

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Ambrose, Sister Mary, O.P., “For A Happy Death,” from
My Gift To Jesus
, copyright © 1929 by Adrian Dominican Sisters. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Baum, Bernie, and Stephan Weiss, “Music! Music! Music!” copyright © 1949 (renewed) 1950 (renewed) by Cromwell Music, Inc., New York and Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Los Angeles, California. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Richmond Org. (TRO).

Florence, Nellie, “Jacksonville Blues,” copyright © by Enterprise Music Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Grainger, P., and E. Robbins, “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business (If I Do),” copyright © 1922, 1949, 1960 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc. All Rights reserved. Used by Permission. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured.

Lashley, Clarence, “Sly Mongoose,” from
Cape Breton’s Magazine
, no. 18, copyright © 1977 by Ronald Caplan. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Ledbetter, Huddie, and John A. Lomax, “Goodnight, Irene,” copyright © 1936 (renewed) 1950 (renewed) by Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Richmond Org. (TRO).

Mercer, Johnny, and Harry Warren, “Jeepers Creepers,” copyright © 1938 (renewed) by Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S., Inc.

Montrose, Percy, “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” copyright © 1884.

Paton, John Glenn,
VACCAI: Practical Method of Italian Singing (for Mezzo-Soprano [Alto] or Baritone, vol. 1910
, copyright © 1975 by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Music Sales Corp.