The checker players chuckle and lisp and call him “Pierre”.
“I don’t got time to be gallivanting off to Sydney,” says Frances, savouring her new gun moll grammar, “I got things to do.”
Twenty minutes later she emerges onto Plummer Avenue, her head a bobbing mess of rusty bedsprings. Canada just got another sweetheart.
She swings into MacIsaac’s Drugs and Confectionery. “Hello Mr MacIsaac, may I please have a packet of pins?”
“I like your haircut, Frances, it’s right jazzy.”
When he turns, she swipes a pack of Turkish tailor-made smokes. He hands her the pins along with a lemon drop and asks her, “What are your plans when you graduate next year, lass?”
“Why, I think I’ll go in for teaching, Mr MacIsaac. I believe it is most important that children get a good start in life, and that’s what a good teacher can give them.”
“You’re smart, you girls. You’ve a gift, each and every one of you.”
She pops the lemon drop into her mouth and leaves the pins on the counter.
She enters the schoolyard throng at morning recess. Frances has decided that today is her last day of school. If she isn’t expelled after what she plans to do, then there’s no justice. She lights a cigarette and looks around for the means to her end. Inside, Mercedes is washing a blackboard. She looks out the window to see her sister smoking right out in the open. And what on earth has Frances got on her head? A strange little cap … of hair. Good Lord. By the time Mercedes gets outside, Frances has taken off somewhere with Puss-Eye Murphy. What can she possibly want with poor sweet Puss-Eye?
Actually, “Puss-Eye” mutated into “Pious-Eye” some time ago, until now most people call him “Pius” or “Father Pie,” so certain is everyone, including himself, of his priestly vocation. So Mercedes stands on the school porch, beating shammies against the stone steps, unable to shake an uneasy feeling, even though she knows that any girl would be perfectly safe with Cornelius “Father Pie” Murphy.
When the bell rings to signal the end of recess, Puss-Eye staggers from one of the derelict outhouses on the edge of the playground and runs sobbing through games of shinny, skipping ropes and hopscotch, across the street into the ballpark, all the way home. Why is he holding his crotch? Mercedes scans the sea of pupils for Frances and spots her strolling away from the outhouses. What in heaven’s name has happened? Students pour up the steps and past Mercedes, speculating as to the nature of Frances Piper’s latest crime — “Kicked him in the nuts.” “Put a snake down his combinations.” Mercedes watches till Frances is out of sight, then she takes a deep breath, collects her brushes and shammies and returns to class, hoping for the best.
That afternoon James receives a note from Sister Saint Eustace. Frances has been expelled.
Midway through supper, Frances arrives home and joins her family at the kitchen table. “Mmmm, boiled mush with mush.”
Lily is amazed at the sight of Frances’s shorn head but, before she can comment, James excuses her and Mercedes from the table. They set down their knives and forks and leave without a word. James stands and raises his hand. Frances doesn’t wince. She doesn’t even look up, none of her involuntary muscles contract in expectation. She just reaches for Lily’s fork and starts eating. James lets his hand drop to his side. He says, suddenly tired, “Don’t bring it home.” She just chews. He carefully moves the plate out of her reach. “Do you hear me, Frances?”
She looks up, affecting good-natured distraction. “What’s that?”
“If you’re going to live here … whatever you get up to … keep it away from Lily.”
Frances reaches for the plate and says, “Don’t worry, Daddy.”
He feels more than tired as he looks at her. The insolent face, the freshly hacked curls. Lost. And gone for ever. What happened to her? My little Frances. James sighs. He can’t think about all that right now. There’s too much of it. It’s too dark in there, and he doesn’t have the energy. He watches her, elbows on the table, humming as she chews. Then he leaves without having laid a hand on her. She’s as beat as she’ll ever be.
Frances told Puss-Eye she needed his advice about a terrible sin someone had confessed to her. Once inside the darkness of the boonie with its antique reek, Frances knocked him down and, with a fistful of his hair and her knee gouging his breastbone, she jammed her other hand down his pants. She grabbed and jerked while he cried. The harder he got the harder he cried, he couldn’t help either one and it didn’t take long, he was only fifteen.
Frances wiped her hand on the floor and left. Mission accomplished. It’s not like I hurt him or anything.
Puss-Eye’s mother knew at the sight of him when he arrived home, he didn’t have to say much except to name his attacker. His father was dead, lucky for Frances, and Petal was far away. Widow Murphy went to the school and told Sister Saint Eustace, in as few words as possible.
If there was any lingering faith on anyone’s part that deep down Frances was good, it has been obliterated.
The next morning, Mercedes arrives at school early as usual and has just enough time before the bell to fill a bucket with soapy water and wash away the cinder scrawl on the side wall, “FRANCES PIPER BURN IN HELL”.
Cheap Women ’n Cheatin’ Men
Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon,
all I want is having you and music, music, music.
I’d do anything for you, anything you’d want me to …,
all I want is loving you and music, music, music.
Now that there’s entertainment, men start bringing the occasional date to the speak. Jameel sets up a couple of tables. Puts on an apron. The women watch the show with varying degrees of disbelief, scorn or fascination while their men affect indifference. Frances has gutted the player-piano of its music rolls and she hammers away at the keys, at first playing Mumma’s old vaudeville music from the hope chest, and then by ear from the records that sailors bring her up from New York City.
Frances is a bizarre delta diva one night, warbling in her thin soprano, “Moonshine Blues” and “Shave ’em Dry”. Declaring, an octave above the norm, “‘I can strut my pudding, spread my grease with ease, ’cause I know my onions, that’s why I always please.’” The following Saturday will see her stripped from the waist up, wearing James’s old horsehair war sporran as a wig, singing, “I’m Just Wild about Harry” in pidgin Arabic. She turns the freckle on her nose to an exclamation mark with a stroke of eyeliner, rouges her cheeks, paints on a cupid’s-bow mouth and dances naked behind a home-made fan of seagull feathers, “‘I wish I could shimmy like my sister, Kate’”.
She invests her early profits in face paint and costumery. She’ll start out as Valentino in a striped robe and turban. While one hand teases the piano keys, she removes the robe to reveal Mata Hari in a haze of purple and red. The seven veils come off one by one to “Scotland the Brave” and, just in case any one’s in danger of getting more horny than amused, there’s always a surprise to wilt the wicked and stimulate the unsuspecting. For example, she may strip down to a diaper, then stick her thumb in her mouth. “‘Yes my heart belongs to Daddy, so I simply couldn’t be ba-ad…. ’”
Her act is fuelled by “jazzoline,” for at first Frances takes most of her pay in liquid form, till she gets wise. Drink is just a means to an end: it inspires her one-woman follies, and it makes her untouchable when she takes the men outside one by one. Because the real money is not in the speak. It’s out back.
Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn’t matter where she’s been or who’s pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it’s for sure no one’s going to be able to steam her open. Frances will bounce in your lap with your fly buttoned for as long as it takes for two bucks. Expensive, but consider the overhead in wardrobe alone. A hand job costs two-fifty — she has a special glove she wears, left over from her first communion. Another fifty cents buys you patter, a song, any name you want to hear. Tou
ch her little chest and cough up an extra buck; nothing below her belt. That’s the menu, no substitutions. If she laughs at you don’t whack her or she’ll holler for Boutros.
Frances starts to make money. Once she has acquired enough trinkets and trash to keep her gussied, she starts saving her money in a secret place. It’s for Lily. Not for a “cure” — Frances does not subscribe to Mercedes’ devout yearnings. In fact, Frances is unsure why she is sure the money is for Lily. She is putting it away “just in case”. In case what? In case.
Frances remains a technical virgin throughout. What is she saving herself for? She can’t say. It’s a feeling. There is something left for her to do. “For Lily.” What, Frances? Something.
Every night, when the last drunks are being peeled off the floor and deposited outside, Frances passes through the tired curtains to the back room and changes. One night, early in her career, she tiptoed up the back stairs and discovered her Aunt Camille sitting in a kitchen, playing solitaire under a dim yellow bulb. Again Frances was struck sad by the sullen heap so like and unlike Mumma. Camille was too absorbed in her cards to notice Frances peering around the door-jamb. Frances watched Camille sip her tea and cheat.
Frances can’t help but wonder how Camille wound up here, married to Jameel. But then, look where Mumma ended up. Maybe Camille eloped too. Frances’s reflections on the subject of romance are summed up by the last scene of Pandora’s Box: when Louise Brooks finally gives it away to a fella for free, he ups and kills her.
Frances has no desire to penetrate any further the shabby mystery of Aunt Camille, so she hasn’t repeated her foray into the upper domestic reaches of the speak. Come closing time she removes her costume among the crates and kegs of the chilly back room and washes her face and hands at the pump. She never washes the costumes. She climbs into her beige woollen stockings, her black button-boots, Girl Guide uniform and beret, and heads back to New Waterford.
Lily is always faithfully at the window, ready with the sheet, even though Daddy never gets home before Frances on weekends any more. James doesn’t want to be there when Frances “sneaks” in or out. He doesn’t want to know where she goes. In the mornings he glances into her room, half expecting to find her gone. Run off with a man, perhaps. Perhaps dead in a ditch.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” rasps Frances, and Lily lowers the knotted bedsheet. Frances is usually fairly sober by the time she climbs in the window, unless she has nicked a jar for the road.
“Want a sip, Lily?”
“No thank you.”
“C’m’ere, dollface.” Lily steps onto Frances’s feet and they spin about while Frances sings, “‘Let’s dance, though you’ve only a small room, make it your ballroom, let’s dance’ —”
Mercedes stands in the darkened doorway, spectral in her white nightgown.
“Join me in a nightcap, toots?”
“Frances, you’re drunk.”
Frances rattles, “The-sheet-is-slit-who-slit-the-sheet-whoever-slit-the-sheet-is-a-good-sheet-slitter. Say it fast, Lily.”
“Frances, it’s time to go to bed.” Mercedes tries to sound calm and bossy at the same time.
“Piss on you, sister.” Frances laughs.
Occasionally, if she’s feeling up to it and Frances is sufficiently intoxicated, Mercedes will seize her round the waist, carry her to the waiting tub and bathe her forcibly, uniform and all. Otherwise Frances would not be fit to live with, for she only ever washes her face and hands. And she never washes her uniform. Mercedes rifles the Guide pouch in search of soiled hankies but finds only a dirty white glove.
“Where’s your other glove, Frances?”
“I only use one.”
“Oh. Well, it may as well be clean.”
Mercedes wrings it under the hot water, asking, “Isn’t it rather small for you now?”
“It does the trick.”
Mercedes does not enquire further.
On relatively sober evenings, Frances curls up next to Lily and whispers whiskey in her ear: “Lily. We are the dead” — Lily pretends to be asleep — “except we don’t know it. We think we’re alive, but we’re not. We all died the same time as Kathleen and we’ve been haunting the house ever since.” Lily prays for everyone, in case Frances is right.
On quite sober evenings, Lily confides her fears.
“Frances, do I have to go to Lourdes?”
“No. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Lily tucks her little foot between Frances’s ankles.
“Frances. Al akbar inshallah?”
“In fallah inti itsy-bitsy spider.”
“Ya koosa gingerbread boy kibbeh?”
“Shalom bi’ salami.”
“Aladdin bi’ sesame.”
“Bezella ya aini Beirut.”
“Te’ berini.”
“Te’ berini.”
“Tipperary.”
Every night, pissed or stone sober, Frances puts her money in the secret place for Lily.
Lady Bountiful
Mercedes graduates top of the class of 1930. Ralph Luvovitz is second. Mercedes gives the valedictory address, in which she urges her fellow young citizens to learn from the mistakes of the past, to seize the numerous challenges of the present and to put their trust in God and His only begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.
James sits near the back of the auditorium with Lily and the Luvovitzes. It’s inadvisable for Frances to be seen near the school premises, so she is absent this evening, although earlier in the day Mercedes entered her bedroom to find a new boxed set of Moroccan-bound The Complete Charlotte Brontë on her dresser. Oh, Frances! The expense. The dubious source of the requisite funds. The generosity. Mercedes cried and hugged Frances and told her she loved her. Frances told Mercedes not to leak all over her uniform.
After the commencement ceremonies, Mercedes, Lily and James repair to the Luvovitz house for tea. Lily wonders again, but does not ask, why all the mirrors are always covered in Mrs Luv’s house. Mercedes and Ralph play happy-sad Klesmer music on piano and clarinet while Mr Luvovitz sings and dances to the delighted embarrassment of Mrs Luvovitz.
As Mercedes’ and Ralph’s heads incline closer over the old Yiddish songbook, Mr and Mrs L exchange complicated looks across the parlour. James doesn’t notice — he simply enjoys the music, unaccustomedly relaxed. A civilized evening with old friends. We should do this more often. He savours a feeling of normalcy for the first time in years. In the increasing absence of Frances, it has become possible for James, now and then, to feel like a good man.
“Have another ruggalech, James.”
“Thank you, Ben, don’t mind if I do. They’re delicious, missus.”
Ralph escorts them home and lingers on the veranda with Mercedes. He tells her he is going away. Not for good. They can write.
“Promise me you’ll write, Mercedes.”
“Of course I will, Ralph.”
His parents have scrimped and saved to send him to McGill University in Montreal.
“I thought you were going to Saint F. X.” Mercedes keeps her voice steady. Saint Frances Xavier University is only a day away by train. It’s where she plans to go. When her family can spare her. But Montreal….
“It’s a great opportunity.”
“Of course it is, Ralph.”
He’s leaving next week, it’s all very sudden. He’s going to live with the Weintraubs, friends of his mother’s relatives who recently emigrated from Munich. They’ve lined up a job for him in a bakery. Ralph is going to be a doctor. He is a scrupulous boy and so does not make any rash proposals of which he is as yet unworthy. He will wait until he has finished his undergraduate degree, then he will ask Mercedes to be his wife.
“Mercedes….”
“Yes, Ralph?”
Mercedes heart beats so rapidly that she fears it has set the ruffles of her yellow silk blouse aflutter. Ralph leans abruptly down and brushes her lips with his own. Then he is away, leaving
Mercedes breathless.
Upstairs, she cools her cheek against the scarlet leather of her brand-new edition of Jane Eyre.
Mercedes and Ralph exchange fervid newsy letters all that summer and through the fall. Their correspondence gives Mercedes strength to endure; to postpone the beginning of her life. She has turned down her scholarship to Saint Frances Xavier University, for how can she think of leaving home when Lily is still a child? Mercedes is so accustomed to doing everything for Daddy’s sake that it seems natural to assign this sacrifice to him as well. But deep down another purpose has been emerging: Frances needs looking after. More than Daddy. More than Lily. What if I were far away at school in Antigonish and Frances didn’t come home one night?
In the meantime, Mercedes is not at a loss for worthwhile work. She has her project: Lily. There have not been any more overt “signs” since the night of Lily’s illness last November. Mercedes does not include — indeed tries not to notice — the reddish highlights that have since appeared in Lily’s hair. And she reminds herself that miracles alone are not sufficient to indicate that special closeness to God which is sainthood; the Life too will be taken into account. To this end, she redoubles her charitable efforts with Lily in tow.
The abundance of free time on Mercedes’ hands now that she is no longer at school dwindles to a pittance once she has scheduled the needs of her community. She learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You’ll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is. Especially in a mining town. Especially in the Depression.
Mercedes bends with grim determination to her mission — if it were enjoyable to immerse oneself in the malodorous misery of the less fortunate, it could not be counted a sacrifice. Offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory. And remember, time is of the essence: saints who are revealed in childhood rarely live to adulthood. Lily’s life has already been painful and Mercedes expects it to be short. She prays. Lily need only survive to celebrate her fourteenth birthday. In the Lourdes tin there is almost thirty dollars.