Fall on Your Knees

  Mrs Mahmoud shrugged and said, “What you like,” and gave him the ritual first taste of the imaginary kibbeh.

  “Delicious,” he said.

  That evening, Mrs Mahmoud watched her husband eat and thought of her lost daughter, perhaps even now serving the same dish to her own husband. Would he appreciate it? Did he love her still?

  Nine miles away, James took a forkful of kibbeh and ate.

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Eat with bread.”

  He followed Materia’s example, drizzling oil over the spiced meat and soft cracked wheat, tearing off bits of flat bread, folding the meat into mouthfuls.

  “Where’d you learn to cook this?”

  “Is raw, no cook.”

  He paused.

  “Kosher?”

  She nodded. He resumed eating. Materia got a pang; she thought, “We’re happy without the girl.”

  She touched the back of his neck lightly.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Nothing,” and she returned to the sink.

  Up till now the vaudevillians had been white, doing their minstrel shows and piccaninny turns in blackface, but now that there was a coloured migration to the Sydney coalfield, genuine coloured artists started coming up from the States. Materia couldn’t figure out why they too performed under cork with giant painted-on mouths, but she did know she preferred them. She acquired a big collection of ragtime, two-step, cakewalk, processionals, sorrow songs, plantation lullabies and gospel.

  She got to play for the Blackville Society Tap Twizzlers when their own accompanist was arrested in Glace Bay. They were a trio of brothers managed by their mother. The eldest had named his feet. He called the left one Alpha and the right one Omega.

  Percussive shoes, flashing feet that chatted, clattered, took flight and girdled the globe without ever leaving centre stage at the Empire Theatre. Materia just watched their feet and let her hands go, chunks of Rigoletto colliding with “Coal Black Rose,” “Una Voce Poco Fa” on a see-saw with “Jimmy Crack Corn,” all slapped up against her own spontaneous compositions — just as for the moving pictures, only with the dancers there was a two-way feed. They hounded, flattered, talked back and twisted — ebony, ivory, and nickel clickers grappling till there wasn’t even any melody, just rhythm and attitude.

  Materia became a bit of a celebrity, especially among the young folk.

  “Hey there Materia, how’s she going, girl?”

  “That’s Mrs Piper to you, buddy,” James shot back.

  It was a Sunday in March, they were out whitewashing the house. He turned to Materia when the feller had slunk by. “How do you know him?”

  “The show.”

  The Blackville Society Tap Twizzlers invited her to tour with them as their permanent accompanist. They were going to Europe. Materia said no. She cried on the way home at the thought of how happy she and James could be, seeing the world together with a travelling show. But she knew better than to ask him.

  The coloured artists stopped coming soon after, because word had gone down the line that the new arrivals in the Sydney coalfield were up from the West Indies and weren’t too interested in American coloured entertainment. But Materia still had the vaudeville and the picture shows and she was happy as long as she could play. Down in the orchestra pit she consoled herself with the occasional embellishment. Now and then a locomotive sped towards the audience through “I Love You Truly,” and ran over them to “Moonlight Sonata”. Villains struggled with virgins to “The Wedding March” and tenors saved the day to “Turkey in the Straw”. Performers complained, but the audience ate it up when rabbits emerged from top hats to discordant splats and women were sawn in half to “Nearer My God to Thee”. Materia had always smiled as she played but now she started chuckling, though she wasn’t aware of it. This further endeared her to the audience, who liked her all the better for being a bit loony.

  These days, James went all the way to Sydney for provisions. With the exception of Benny and Mr MacIsaac, he didn’t darken the door of any Boom Town establishment. Why go in to be insulted when he was paying good money? The whole town was suffering as a result of the strike, not just the miners, so everyone loved to hate a scab. He never walked, he drove his cart so as not to give people the satisfaction of crossing the street when they saw him coming. “And all because I have the gumption to support my family.” It was galling, therefore, on the rare occasion when Materia accompanied him, to hear time and again, “Hello there Materia, how’s the show business, dear?” The same people who wouldn’t give him the time of day would stop to chat with his illiterate wife about her career as a player-piano. Naturally these people would appreciate a low type of music. And why were they out spending money they supposedly didn’t have on the price of admission at the Empire Theatre? There were too many Irish in this town by now for James’s liking. Every second house a shebeen, drunken Catholics the lot. If they worked more and fiddled less they wouldn’t be in such a mess. James thought of Aesop’s grasshopper and ant and made a mental note to enclose the fable in his next letter to Kathleen.

  Picking up a packet of starch at MacIsaac’s, James had to endure “You’ve got a very talented wife, Mr Piper.”

  James paid. MacIsaac continued, “And how’s the wee lass?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “She’s got a gift, that one.”

  James nodded. MacIsaac smiled and added, “Gets it from her mother, no doubt.”

  James turned and left the store. He wouldn’t be taking Kathleen in there again. He decided he didn’t trust the bald man. He didn’t like the way he looked at children with his watery blue eyes and his big red face. If MacIsaac liked children so much why didn’t he have any of his own?

  When James left, Mrs MacIsaac said to her man, “We shouldn’t let Piper set foot in here.”

  MacIsaac smiled softly at his wife, then retired to his greenhouse. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

  Everyone liked MacIsaac, though not everyone understood how he could tolerate a man like Piper. But MacIsaac didn’t see the point in penalizing a man’s family for a man’s mistakes and that was what you did when you cut a feller off. People shrugged and figured maybe MacIsaac was just religious. And he was, in a way; he spent a lot of time finding medicine out in the fields where other people saw only stones and scrub. He cultivated the plants in his greenhouse. Never called in a debt. Pity about the drink.

  At the end of that week, James sat down to his latkes and molasses and said, “I want you to quit your job now, missus, I’m earning enough at the pit.”

  No answer. He looked up. Hard to know sometimes if she even registered a word he said.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “… Okay.”

  “And don’t be traipsing around town on your own.”

  How unhappy are they who have a gift that’s left to germinate in darkness. The pale plant will sink invisible roots and live whitely off their blood.

  The first week away from the Empire was hardest. The empty house, and at night James, who required feeding and nothing else. She searched for the key to the piano, and finally pried the instrument open with a knife. But after a few numbers she fell silent. She needed a stage, not a garret. No audience, no show. Materia took her sheaf of music and put it in the hope chest.

  She cleaned the house and cooked a lot. Ate. She didn’t have the heart to spend much time with Mrs Luvovitz because the boys, Abe and Rudy, were a reproach to her soul. How could it be that she loved another woman’s children and not her own? The interlude at the Empire receded and became unreal. Now that Materia was on her own again, with plenty of time to think, all her badness rolled back in and enveloped her: to have left her father’s house, to have disobeyed and dishonoured her parents — that was against the Commandments.

  I have to go to confession, she thought, but then … in order to be forgiven I must be heartily sorry, but to be sorry for eloping means to be sorry for every
thing that came from it. And she couldn’t be. She still wanted her husband and that too was a sin: to want the man, and not the child that comes from the marital act. And so she would keep coming back to her original sin.

  She resumed her prayers to the Blessed Virgin. It pierced her heart, and it seemed a dreadful vapour rose from the wound, when she realized she hadn’t given a thought to her daughter all this time. Not a note had she sent, no package of goodies from home, she hadn’t even asked James, “How’s the girl?” Materia saw herself in a clear glass at last, and it was monstrous.

  Whom could she tell? No one. Yet she must tell or die.

  In the second week, Materia left the house and walked to the cliff but didn’t linger there as she used to. She scrambled down to the rocky shore and walked. She didn’t sing, she talked and talked in her mother tongue to the stones, till she grew dizzy and the day grew grey and she lost track of where she was. Finally, as sometimes happens in this part of the world, the clouds lifted. A burning sky lit the sea in rippling tongues of red and gold. Materia fell silent. She faced the horizon and listened until she heard what the sea was saying to her: “Give it to me, my daughter. And I will take it and wash it and carry it to a far country until it is no longer your sin; but just a curiosity adrift, beached and made innocent.”

  And so, day after day, Materia slowly let her mind ebb away. Until she was ready to part with it once and for all.

  Quanto Dolor

  “I’m very fond of dividing and classifying and examining, you see I’m so much alone, I’ve so much time for reflection, and Papa is training me to think.”

  CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E.

  The strike ended in April 1910, and James got a job on the surface as a checkweighman in reward for his loyalty. He had expected to see his pit buddy Albert up there too, had hoped to get a look at him in the light of day, but Albert had been let go. He had moved on to Sydney with many others from Fourteen Yard, and settled in Whitney Pier in the neighbourhood known as The Coke Ovens. There were lots of people there up from the West Indies; the Dominion Iron and Steel Company knew the value of a strong man who could stand heat. The Coke Ovens was a cosy community, its houses painted everything but white, snuggled right up against the steel mill. The mill put bread on the table and a fine orange dust on the bread.

  In the boom town the company houses were tenanted once more, the Company Store took miners’ scrip again, the last children were buried and Kathleen came home. James had a surprise waiting: electric lights, and a modern water-closet complete with indoor toilet, enamel tub and nickel-plated taps, hot and cold.

  What with his hours at the pithead, James could no longer drive Kathleen to and from Holy Angels. He hired a fellow from The Coke Ovens who drove his own horse and buggy. James was taken aback by his youth — Leo Taylor was barely sixteen — but he was steady, James made sure.

  “No detours, straight there and straight home.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I don’t want you talking to her.”

  “No sir.”

  “Don’t touch her.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t worry, sir.”

  James reflected that he’d rather have a timid youth drive his daughter than a leering man. The fact that Taylor was coloured made James feel all the more confident of the necessary distance between driver and passenger.

  Although she no longer had any buddies in the boom town, Kathleen was relieved to be living at home again. Boarding at Holy Angels had been lonely. At first she’d cried herself to sleep, comforted only by the notes and treats that her daddy sent. But she knew that sacrifices were being made, knew what was expected of her, didn’t flinch. She studied hard, obeyed the nuns and never complained, though she did pray for a fairy godmother to send her a friend, for there was no one to play with at Holy Angels. No boys. No cinders embedded in her knees. Other little girls weren’t interested in swordfights and adventure or in who could enact the most spectacular death scene. Other girls were preoccupied with meticulous feminine arcana of which Kathleen knew nothing; what was more, none of them had careers. Initially, her schoolmates had vied for Kathleen’s friendship — she was so pretty, so smart. But she failed to decode pecking orders, declined gracious invitations to braid other girls’ hair and made a lasso of the skipping-rope. They put her down as odd until, finally, they shunned her altogether.

  Kathleen threw herself into her work and cultivated an insouciant nonconformity — her sash low-slung and tied in front, hat pushed back, hands jammed into the pockets that she ordered her mother to sew into her uniforms, her long hair waving loose. The nuns made allowances. She had a gift.

  In the fall of 1911 they sailed to the mainland — James, Kathleen and her singing teacher, Sister Saint Cecilia — to a recital at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Halifax. An invited audience of professionals.

  “Look me in the eyes.”

  She did. He invoked the spirits,

  “What did Stendhal say of Elisabetta Gafforini?”

  “‘Whether you see, or only hear her, your peril is the same.’”

  “That’s the stuff.” His usual affectionate bonk on the head. “Now go out there and show ’em who’s boss.”

  Kathleen sang Cherubino’s love poem to Susanna from Le Nozze di Figaro. Teachers from New York City gave James their cards, they were looking for the next Emma Albani. Told him what he already knew.

  Henriette Sontag debuted at six, Maria Malibran at five; Adelina Patti was younger every year, her legend already way ahead of her mortality; but James was so serious about Kathleen’s career that he could wait for it to begin. Patience is the mark of the true player. Her voice would last, not burn out in a blaze of adolescent glory. He would send her to Halifax for a year to get her sea-legs. Then on to Milano at eighteen.

  Kathleen turned twelve.

  “When Malibran’s father told her she must go on for Giuditta Pasta, as Desdemona to his Otello, he looked her in the eye and swore that if she did not sing perfectly, when it came to the scene where Otello murders Desdemona, he really would kill her.”

  Kathleen laughed and said, “You’re a melodramatic old feller, aren’t you.”

  Materia marvelled. The girl was saucy, she deserved a good slap talking to her father like that, but never got one, got a chuckle and a wink instead.

  Kathleen had a way of swaggering a little even standing still, and especially when leaning against a piano. She didn’t yet know how beautiful she was, but she’d begun to suspect. She’d begun to care about how she walked, to gauge her effect on others. She practised world-weary expressions in front of the mirror. She looked up the word “languid”. She adopted a tone of amused scorn and loved to kid her father about his romantic obsession with la Voce, ordering him to fetch her grapes and peel them too. “If I’m going to be a diva, you’d better start treating me like one.”

  He loved her way: acting casual, working like a Trojan, singing like an angel. Not “angelically”. The voice of an angel. Winged, lethal, close to the sun.

  When Malibran died too young too fast —

  “Sure, sure, her voice went into her husband’s violin. And pigs fly.”

  She had the world by the tail. A modern girl. James had read about the “New Woman”. That’s what my daughter’s going to be.

  One Friday afternoon in March 1912, while Materia is in the kitchen cooking a magnificent silent supper and James is half-entombed in the old piano, Kathleen appears in the archway of the front room.

  She’s wearing her Holy Angels uniform. She’s grown tall. Leaning in the doorway, her weight on one hip, feeling her teens though they’re a year off. A smile plays about her mouth at the sight of her old dad toiling over the strings of that decrepit war-horse. She glances down, bites her lip, then steals over to the piano and strikes a chord.

  James springs up and around, though the hammers barely winged him, belts her with an open hand then a closed fist before he
realizes who it is and what he’s done, and how he’d never, not even Materia, though God knows —

  His daughter is crying. She’s shocked. He’s hurt her, how? With my own hands. Dear God.

  He reaches out, grazes a shoulder, an elbow, finds the small of her back, crushes her to him, he has never, would never do anything to hurt you, rather die, cut off my arms. He feels so acutely what she feels, clasping her, “Don’t cry,” a perishing empathy, “Hush now,” his throat scorched and taut, “Shshshsh,” he must protect her from — he must shield her from — what? … From all of it. From it all.

  A life and a warmth enter his body that he hasn’t felt since — that he has rarely felt. She will be safe with him, I’ll keep you safe, my darling, oh how he loves this girl. He holds her close, no harm, never any harm. Her hair smells like the raw edge of spring, her skin is the silk of a thousand spinning-wheels, her breath so soft and fragrant, milk and honey are beneath your tongue…. Then he shocks himself. He lets her go and draws back abruptly so she will not notice what has happened to him. Sick. I must be sick. He leaves the room and bolts through the back door, across the yard, over the creek to the garden, where he calms down enough to vomit.

  Materia gets her balance in the archway where she stumbled just now, when James knocked her aside on his retreat. She came when she heard the commotion, and stopped in the doorway and watched. She’s still watching. She goes to her daughter.

  One of Kathleen’s teeth is loose. She’s young, it’ll mend. There’s a silly amount of blood on the carpet. Looks worse than it is. Materia takes Kathleen by the hand to the kitchen, where she washes her at the pump. She puts her to bed and brings her soft food. Sings until the green eyes close. Takes a pillow and places it gently over the sleeping face.

  But removes it the next instant. If Materia’s heart were full, she’d know what to do. Who to save, how. Loving the girl now seems like an easy task compared with protecting her. It’s because I failed the first test that I am confronted with the second.