Mercedes has observed Lily’s particular gift with the veterans. On the top floor of the pleasant west wing of New Waterford General Hospital, there live a handful of men whose injuries and lack of family have rendered them permanent residents. Some have no arms or legs. Three were gassed — they are perfectly fine and whole other than their lungs. They sit quietly near the window wearing their oxygen masks till the sun goes down and it’s time to lie perfectly still in their oxygen tents. Their eyes have enlarged and the lines have dropped away from around their mouths behind the masks. They look like big children — maybe that’s why they like to see Lily coming. They are child grown-ups and she is a grown-up child.
Lily doesn’t flinch when she meets the man with no face, just a blank stretch of baby skin with nose holes and a lipless mouth that doesn’t quite close. He doesn’t mask his missing face because he never goes out and everyone on the ward is used to him; what’s more, he can’t frighten himself, he has no eyes. His great pleasure is a cigarette and, now, touching Lily’s face. He has found the bump in her forehead and it amuses him. He swears he was uglier before and shows Lily a picture to prove it. Lily agrees that he was putrid-looking and he laughs. Mercedes notes this as worthy of inclusion in The Life of Saint Lily, for Mercedes has never known this man to do more than grunt an obscenity, much less laugh.
Lily is not repelled by the veterans. She feels badly for them, they’ve been terribly hurt, but pity is a poison unction. Lily has experienced pity but she didn’t know what to call it, she only knew it made her terribly afraid. As if she had disappeared and become a ghost. Having experienced her own disappearance, she is conscious of how important it is for people to be seen, so when she looks at them — even the blind one — she also looks for them, just in case they too have got lost and need finding.
They play gin rummy until she learns poker. The gas men are the only ones who never laugh, though they enjoy themselves.
On the way home, when Mercedes quizzes her, Lily always feels she has somehow let her sister down when she answers truthfully, “I had fun.”
Every evening, when the day’s ministrations are done, Mercedes indulges herself with a gloriously blank sheet of paper: “Dear Ralph….”
There are things Lily could tell Mercedes that would have quite another effect, but it never occurs to her to do so. For example, Mr MacIsaac has stopped drinking. He tells Lily she has healed him. He tells her she has “the gift”. It happened one day when Lily asked to see where he grew the medicine. Mr MacIsaac took her back to his greenhouse.
Mr MacIsaac is also a veteran, though of the Boer War. It too was a bad war. He has said there’s no such thing as a good one. He and Lily both limp on the same side and he likes to tell her they’d run one heck of a three-legged race together. He tells her how like she is to her beautiful sister Kathleen, “God rest her soul.” Especially now that the red is coming out in her hair. “Faery hair” Mr MacIsaac calls it, a twinkle in his kind bleary eye. “Don’t worry, lass, that’s a good thing.”
They went through a canvas door into the greenhouse. The air was mysterious to breathe, damp like an underground lake. There were plants in boxes everywhere, each with a special power but none, it seemed, that could cure him.
But the miraculous thing was overhead. Lily looked up at the glass roof. The sun came out from behind a cloud and filtered through the tiny panes. Before her eyes a host took shape. Shadows of green and grey, a ghostly army in uniform, smiling down at her. For ever young.
Glass photographic plates. Mr MacIsaac collected them — so many were discarded after the war, there being no demand for additional prints of such photos once their subjects had been killed.
“They’re my children,” he said. “We were never blessed with our own, so I think about all the people who lost theirs and how maybe I’d have lost mine too anyhow, things being what they were.”
Mrs MacIsaac had died early that year and people expected Mister to follow soon at the rate he was going, constantly quietly soused.
Lily said, “I’ll be your child.”
He laughed his wheezy laugh, then covered up his face. He reached for her hand and placed it on his bald head. After a while he gave her back her hand and looked up again. He asked her to do something for him.
“Whenever you pass by my door, say a Hail Mary for me. Will you do that?”
Lily promised she would, and she did. Still does. She didn’t tell anyone because it seemed private. Soon people were saying it was a miracle that Mr MacIsaac had quit the bottle. Even though there was barely a soul in town who didn’t owe him money, there was no one who wouldn’t rather see him spry behind his counter.
MacIsaac would live long enough to extend credit right through the Great Depression, and die a rich man on paper.
Lily did not feel disloyal to Daddy when she told Mr MacIsaac she would be his child. Frances would say, “That’s because Daddy’s not your real father.” But Lily knows he is. Just as she knows that it is possible to love everyone the most. Even if she can’t help loving Frances most of all.
The Ginger Man
Jameel has been charging admission on show nights. He makes Boutros wear a fez. He has replaced the faded curtain with a beaded one. There are ashtrays. There are glasses. He ups the price of poison. He’s still paying Frances a nickel a night. In September he has the nerve to demand a cut of her earnings from her private customers. What he gets is a new deal.
“Look buddy, I’ve turned this dump into a cultural Mecca, so don’t you be talking to me about cutting you in, you’re cutting me in, pal, I’m in for fifty percent of the door or I walk and talk.”
“Fuck you.”
“Sixty.”
“Forty.”
“Auryvoir.”
He grabs her arm. “Forty-five.”
“Kiss my arse.”
“Fifty.”
“Gimme a light.”
He lights her cigarette. “All right. You’re in now, so if you foul up I’ll cut your throat just like I would a man’s.”
“Get me a decent piano in here.”
Boutrous neither confirms nor denies Jameel’s threat, he just counts out half the evening’s admissions and hands it over to Frances.
“Hey Boutros,” she says. “I didn’t know you could count, b’y.” She winks at him and heads for the back room to change out of her diaper and merry widow.
In a place like this it’s best to get a man’s status — the threat of throat-cutting and only throat-cutting simplifies a woman’s survival. Frances trades in her coins and two-dollar bills for larger notes at the bank in order to fit it all into her hiding-place.
When the sweetheart of Whitney Pier turns seventeen there’s a cake and presents and everything. The clientele, which has grown more checkered along with Frances’s reputation, sings “Happy Birthday”. A woman whom Frances calls “The Countess” because she looks like the lesbian in Pandora’s Box gives her a one-way ticket to Boston. The Countess has got a big education and some kind of set-up down there — she’s described it to Frances a thousand times but Frances, though she keeps her eyeballs pointing in the same direction no matter how much she’s had to drink, still can’t get it straight whether this woman runs a nightclub or a home for wayward girls. “My intentions are entirely honourable, Fanny,” says the Countess, at which Frances yawns in her face and winks. A stoker named Henry gives Frances the latest Bessie Smith, “Black Mountain Blues”. She gives him a big sloppy kiss, then holds her hand out for a quarter, and everyone laughs. Archie “White-Socks” MacGillicuddy, who everybody knows is a sissy-boy, comes wearing his thing outside his pants gaily gift-wrapped with a bow and a tag, “For Frances”. Frances tells Boutros to open it for her, “Go on Buttress, good things come in small packages.” Boutros declines. Leo Taylor shows up at the front door in time to see Jameel parading through the crowd bearing a pint-size painted whore with a parasol on his shoulders. Taylor yells over the din, “Mr Jameel, I got what you ordered.”
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Jameel sets Frances down and numerous hands cover her eyes before she can turn around, “Who toined out the lights?!” Boutros leaves with Taylor. After a few moments they return, veins bulging in their necks, inching a good-as-new upright piano through the door.
Taylor delivers the booze on weekday afternoons so he has never seen the place in action, which has been just fine by him. He dislikes drunks, and prostitutes dismay him — they are all someone’s daughter. This one is small enough to be a child but surely that’s impossible — he is just as glad that her face is obscured by someone’s hands. There’s no missing the oversize red ringlets of her wig, however, or her hands spinning the parasol — lily-white to the wrists, where two sleeves of grime begin. Grime that has accumulated through contact with nothing but time. And he can’t avoid her scent as he sets down his end of the piano before her. She smells like a neglected baby, that sad sour-milk pee-stain smell. Taylor leaves and comes back with a piano stool, but she’s already seated with her back to him, demurely rendering “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”. It disturbs him: such a little-girl voice.
Frances doesn’t miss a sweet beat as Boutros gets up off his hands and knees and is replaced by the stool.
Leo Taylor leaves feeling a bit sick. The steel door closes behind him and he hears the piano become a pie-anny as schmaltz transmogrifies to boogie. He steps up into his truck and starts the engine. He would like to go home and kiss his wife and kids again for the road but there’s no time. Along with liquor, he’s hauling live lobsters to New York City for all the fine old families and newly minted gangsters who can afford them.
He points his truck south on Highway 4 and conjures his wife’s voice and image to keep him company. He calls up every precious detail: rusty wire hair, dark brown freckles across her light brown face, sharpshooter eyes. Lean and mean, it makes him chuckle. They commune all the way to the Strait of Canso, till he’s off the island and he figures he ought to let her get some sleep. “Goodnight, Addy,” he says, smiling at how she’d raz him for his sappiness if she could see him chatting to her out loud in his truck as it rolls onto the ferry-boat. He sees her wry smile as she reaches up to kiss him, “Goodnight, Ginger,” she says. “Drive safe, baby.”
Leo Taylor is not called Ginger because he is a light black man. He is dark like his sister, Teresa. He is called Ginger because he brews real ginger beer from a West Indian recipe passed to him by his mother, Clarisse. Clarisse used to sell it but Ginger can afford to give it away as a treat. He has the strong arms and soft belly of a happy man. He often counts his blessings, wondering how he got so lucky in life. A good job, healthy beautiful children and a tough wife. That night, Frances crawls into bed next to Lily as usual but before long awakens from another nightmare. There are dreams Frances is used to by now, like the one where she gives her own amputated leg to Lily but it’s the wrong size. There are dreams she’ll never get used to, where she puts Lily in the oven by mistake and cooks her but Mumma doesn’t seem to notice that the roast is Lily and neither does anyone else at the table. But tonight Frances awakens with her throat constricted in a silent scream — Mumma in the garden on the scarecrow stick, wearing the old fedora and one of her baggy flowered dresses all crusty down the front, and she’s holding the steak-and-kidney-pie scissors with a bit of pink gristle hanging off. But the worst part is she has no face. Mumma! —
Frances is determined not to watch to the end of this silent picture, in case it becomes a talkie. She needs to sleep in a place of no dreams. A place both empty and utterly silent. The attic, being in a state of permanent shock, is both.
Trixie follows as Frances drags a blanket and a pile of cushions across the hall to the door of the attic stairs. She opens the door, but both she and Trixie hesitate. The problem is that, although the attic is not haunted, the stairs leading up to it are.
Frances stands barefoot at the bottom looking up into the narrow passage. She feels a tightness at her scalp as though she still had braids. In the darkness, her body distends and contracts wildly as though she were an elastic band — suddenly ten feet long and curved, then very small like a young child. “I forgot to put my housecoat on” — Frances sees her green tartan housecoat in her mind, “but that’s silly because I haven’t had that housecoat since Mercedes and I were little and everything matched.” Frances is on the first step. A wet chill down her spine restores her body to its normal size and she is seized with fear because she can hear voices. Just below the water, they are still fish voices but they are bubbling to the surface, in a moment she will understand what they are saying. Frances starts babbling quietly with her hands over her ears and forces herself onto the second step. Damp shadows slipper by, Kathleen is up there. No she isn’t, that’s just the kittens, stop — they have to be baptized — don’t — “who’s the killer?!”— don’t — “you’re the Devil!” — don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, all the way up the stairs till she gets to the top and opens the door.
Arriving in the attic is like arriving in the desert after almost drowning. She closes the door behind her. Trixie leaps silently onto the window-ledge. Frances lies on the floor. She closes her eyes and sleeps deeply and blankly, no longer any need to fear death by dreaming.
Frances awakens the next day more sober than she’s been in almost a year. She finds a train ticket to Boston in her Guide pouch but doesn’t remember how it got there. She goes to the station in Sydney and scalps it for cash. She has no intention of leaving the island until she has made enough money for Lily. And accomplished something else too. What, Frances? Something. She will know it when she sees it. She is a commando in training for a mission so secret that even she does not know what it is. But she is ready. Every night the obstacle course. Manoeuvring behind the lines. Camouflaged to blend with the terrain.
Your voice is sad whene’er you speak …
The night before the war ends, Kathleen unties an emerald sash from around the waist of her scandalous new dress of pale green silk chiffon, and winds it round and round the brim of her lover’s charcoal fedora. She runs her hands up the diamond-studded shirt front and slips her thigh between the stripes of the wide black-and-tan pant legs.
There are mixed clubs they can go to uptown. And there is a private place in Central Park. They have to be careful, but it’s hard. They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.
And tears bedim your loving eyes….
Book 6
THE GIRL GUIDE
Don’t Whine
By May 1931, Mercedes is downright worried. She hasn’t heard from Ralph in eight weeks. She won’t ask Mrs Luvovitz about him because it is unladylike for a girl to seem to be pursuing a boy, and Mercedes doesn’t want to appear “fast” — especially in the eyes of her future mother-in-law. And besides, if Ralph were in trouble his parents would know, and they appear to be quite unperturbed. Nonetheless, Mercedes drops into Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian several times a week, the darnedest items having slipped her mind — “Oh Mrs Luvovitz, would you believe I forgot to pick up a pound of blood pudding for Daddy.”
One Thursday afternoon, Mercedes returns to Luvovitz’s to buy a box of salt she forgot that morning. As Mrs Luvovitz rings up the purchase she smiles a little oddly at Mercedes and enquires, “Well now. And how’s your father, dear?”
“Oh he’s well, Mrs Luvovitz, thank you.”
The two of them nod and smile at each other yet neither makes a move to leave. Mercedes asks, “And how’s Mr Luvovitz?”
“Oh you know Mister, he’s grand, dear, just grand.”
Mercedes chuckles and nods.
Mrs Luvovitz asks, “How are your sisters?”
“Lily is grand, thank you, and Frances seems — well, I worry a little about Frances, she’s … still finding herself, you know….”
“We all worry, dear, but she’s a — deep down, you know, she’s fine.”
“Thank you, yes.”
Mrs Luvovitz reaches for a tin of Ovaltin
e and hands it to Mercedes. “Have you ever tried this? This we get from England.”
“Oh, really? No, I never have.”
“Here, try it, you’ll like it.”
“Oh” — Mercedes reddens and reaches for her purse, unsure as to — but Mrs Luvovitz places a hand on hers and, in the familiar scolding voice that puts Mercedes back at ease, “Ay-yay-yay, what do you think you’re doing, put your money away now.”
Mercedes says, “Thank you very much, Mrs Luvovitz, that’s awfully nice of you,” and feels foolish, aware she must be thanking Mrs Luvovitz rather too profusely because Mrs Luv’s smile has turned a bit pink. In fact Mercedes has never before seen such a sustained smile on the dear lady’s face. Mercedes smiles back, longing to ask, “Have you heard from Ralph?” Instead she thanks Mrs Luvovitz once again and turns to leave, but Mrs Luvovitz pipes up, “Have you heard from Ralph?”
Mercedes turns back. Now she is truly worried. “No I haven’t, oh dear —”
“He’s fine, he’s fine, our friends write he’s fine, he’s perfect, it’s just —”
“Oh, well, that is good news —”
“We haven’t had a letter from him and I wondered —”
“Oh dear.” They look at one another a moment, then Mercedes shakes her head. “I’m afraid I haven’t had one in quite some time either.”
Mercedes is both bewildered and embarrassed by what follows. Mrs Luvovitz squeezes Mercedes’ hands between her own and says, with her chin wrinkled in a smile against tears, “You’re a good girl, Mercedes, a wonderful girl.”
“Thank you, Mrs Luvovitz.” Mercedes drops the Ovaltine into her net bag and almost forgets the salt, adding, “I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve heard from Ralph.”
But Mrs Luvovitz has turned back to the shelves and is carefully straightening a box of steel wool.
Three weeks later, the longed-for letter arrives. Mercedes carries it up to her room, taking the stairs an unaccustomed two at a time. She flings herself onto her bed, kissing the envelope before her head hits the pillow, and spends a moment lying on her side just caressing the seal. Dear Ralph. His features have smoothed and his voice has deepened in her mind over these past many months. She sighs, catches sight of her red cheeks in her dresser mirror and commands, “Don’t be such a silly chit, Mrs Ralph Luvovitz” — which makes her giggle and she hugs her pillow and buries her face in it at the same time. Finally she composes herself enough to open the letter. “Dear Mercedes” — dear Ralph — “I feel conceited even writing this to you because you are such a swell girl and could have any fellow in the world instead of settling for me anyhow, but I feel I had better say it because maybe you’ll think I’m a coward if I don’t. Here goes. I am terribly sorry if I ever led you to expect….”