He is back in the car before he can bring himself to open the letter. He remembers another letter so long ago. Anonymous. Horrible. It changed everything. He breaks the seal. He unfolds the page — a refined and ladylike hand. He reads:
Dear Kathleen,
I was so sorry to learn of your terrible accident. You are obviously a very brave girl. And you are also a lucky one to have such a nice father. Maybe one day you will be able to leave your wheelchair and run and play again. I hope so. Here is a signed photograph for your collection with my best wishes.
Yours truly,
Lillian Gish
James presses the electric starter on the Hupmobile and heads for home. He will take Frances out to the shed. And ask her to explain the joke.
That night, Mercedes, Lily and Daddy stand on the veranda and glimpse the torches processing through town. Frances is upstairs in bed with a damp cloth to her face. James has the car packed and gassed up in case they all have to leave in a hurry. The army won’t be here for another couple of days and, until then, it’s better to be prepared.
First the miners burn down Number 12 washhouse. Then they raid the company stores — they don’t burn them for fear of setting the whole town on fire. Then they go to the jailhouse to lynch the company police. But the priest meets them and talks them out of it. There are enough fatherless children in New Waterford.
to where your heart has ever been …
October 31, 1918
Dear Mr Piper,
Your daughter is in grave danger. Knowing Kathleen to be of good family and blessed with prodigious musical gifts, I feel it my duty to you and to the world to sound the alarm. Sir, you are from another country and perhaps fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the very term “miscegenation”. It is a modern evil and it is weakening the fabric of our nation. It now threatens to claim your own daughter. Through cunning seduction and flattery, your daughter has been ensnared in a net of godless music and immorality. I look on helpless to intervene because I am an invalid. I speak as one who knows to her own cost, when I say that by crossing nature’s divide, your daughter courts her own ruin and can end only by yielding to the dark remnants of the beast in man. It is, perhaps, not too late. She is yet young. It is your prerogative to ignore, yea to condemn the report of a stranger. My conscience dictates this letter. Thus discharged of my Christian duty, I remain,
An Anonymous Well-Wisher
since first you were my bonny bride …
Book 4
THE OLD FRENCH MINE
Lest We Forget
Lily’s foot is bleeding. She doesn’t know it, because the bagpipes are drowning out the pain. This is what bagpipes are designed to do. But even if she felt the pain and saw the blood soaking the back of her stocking, Lily would not stop marching, because she is on top of the world. She is carrying the Nova Scotia flag up Plummer Avenue. Her heart and lungs are big and plaid like the tartan bags of air that feed the pipes. And for once Lily’s type of walking is the ideal type. The sway and lilt of her unevenly matched legs go with the every-second-beat flex and swing of the music. Lily has a big open smile on her face and tears in her eyes — the pipes always make her feel tragic and elated all at the same time. With a poppy pinned to her tartan sash, she feels like a brave soldier. It’s November 11, 1929, Armistice Day. Today we remember The War to End All Wars.
New Waterford is out in force. Plummer Avenue is lined. Even James is out — not in his capacity as veteran, but as proud father. Mercedes stands at his side in front of Cribb’s Bookstore. Across the street, Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian is closed, the blinds drawn down. There is no danger of them forgetting this day, but Mrs Luvovitz prefers them to do their remembering at home, far from the sights and sounds of Sacrifice and Honour. Frances is supposed to be here but she is at the Empire Theatre, watching Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box again before the authorities get wind and it gets banned.
The parade swings towards the Miners’ Monument. Although it was erected in memory of the sixty-five who died in the explosion of ’17, it has become a symbol of all the others who have been killed in battles both foreign and domestic: those like Mr Davis, who were shot in the street, and all those who ever have been or will be blown up or gassed in a trench or mine. The pipes fall abruptly silent. Lily and the rest of the parade march on to the stark beating of the drums, until they halt at the monument. Then it’s two minutes of silence.
You can hear the ocean. You can hear birds and the wind. You can hear the poppies blow in Flanders fields between the crosses row on row, “we are the Dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved.” Men have stony expressions on their faces, their hands folded in front. Women look severe. Everyone remembers their dear ones who will always be young.
Then a wrenching groan, a high-pitched wail, the drones start up and the pipes are on the march again. This releases tears, although the bagpipes do people’s keening for them. A primitive reed instrument awakens something very old, and puts sorrow in a consolingly long perspective. Perhaps because grass is the oldest musical instrument for all kinds of people.
Lily feels secure among all the hard hairy pale male knees keeping time between socks and swinging sporrans and swaying kilts. She feels a camaraderie with the men. As if they’d all fought the war together. She would like to be a soldier. She’s ten. She would like to be a veteran when she grows up. She wouldn’t be afraid of the pain or the bullets, she’d leap over the top and charge with bare knees into battle. Daddy got the DSO medal. She knows because Mr MacIsaac told her.
It’s only when the pipes and drums cease and the brass band at the rear strikes up “Rule Britannia” that Lily feels the first twinge in her left foot, the little one. Her brown boot, with the built-up sole that Daddy made specially, is firmly harnessed between the steel supports of her brace, but it has been rubbing the top of her heel because it’s new. A red stain has spread around her ankle. Lily steals a look, but doesn’t miss a beat. There are Daddy and Mercedes. There are Mr and Mrs MacIsaac. Lily gives them what she hopes is a manly smile. Many people, not just those she knows, smile back.
Lily is unaware of the stigma surrounding her father, and people — not only her family — conspire to keep her that way. There are plenty of children with braces on their legs, some with crooked backs too, but Lily is the only one out marching. She is also the prettiest child ever to have been stricken. And the sweetest. Lily has become well known in town thanks to Mercedes, but she has become well loved because of herself.
New Waterford hasn’t changed much. The company stores have gone. Besco never reopened them after the looting of ’25. Many miners went back to work with an eight-percent wage cut but many others were blacklisted as Bolsheviks and wound up moving south of the border to Boston, and to the mills and lumber camps of New England. It was the beginning of the exodus to points south and west which shows no sign of stopping. The crash of ’29 rocked the world but registered as a ripple in Cape Breton, where it takes a while for the Depression to sink in because it had already been going on for so long. Besides, it is widely believed that Nova Scotia’s catastrophe occurred in 1867 with Confederation. Anything since then has just been an aftershock. No one can imagine how the thirties could be worse than the twenties. And as R.B. Bennett is fond of saying, “Prosperity is just around the corner.”
But nothing can dampen civic pride — the turn-out today shows that. Cape Bretoners have reconciled loyalty to King and country with scorn and skepticism for all things “from away” — the foolish arses in Upper Canada and the useless bowler hats in Whitehall. They are fiercely proud of their veterans, yet bitter about the Canadian army that has so often invaded the coalfields. In spite of this, the armed forces are increasingly an option for the jobless and the working poor looking to get off this cursèd godforsaken rock that they love more than the breath in their own lungs. There is no such place as “down home” unless you are “away”. By November 1929 the process is under way whe
reby, eventually, more people will have a “down home” than a “home”. Remembrance Day tends to stir up a lot of mixed emotions.
On days like this, Prohibition seems doubly ludicrous. By evening, kitchens will overflow with music and family and conversation. Jugs and cups of tea will be passed around. Mounties will turn a blind eye to hotel bars and speakeasies and more than one brawl will add to the evening’s entertainment.
James will not work tonight. And he certainly will not socialize, although this is the one night when bridges might be mended — he is a veteran, after all, and decorated. But this is also one of two nights in the year when he does not trust himself near a bottle, because he wishes to forget, not remember, the day the Armistice was signed. All over town, people are asking each other the ritual question “Do you remember where you were the day the war ended, b’y?” James remembers all too well. He was in New York City. He was in Giles’s apartment in Greenwich Village. He was walking through the front door because it was unlocked. He had called out but no one answered. He is walking down the hallway, the apartment smells like lavender, he is looking for Kathleen, he finds her — stop
Tonight James needs to be safe at home in the bosom of his family.
Frances is already home playing piano, imagining her future life as a white slave cabaret dancer in Cairo, playing Mumma’s forbidden music from the hope chest — Daddy says it’s coloured music, put it away. She is bobbing on the bench to “Coal Black Rose” when James and Mercedes rush in with Lily. Daddy carries Lily upstairs and Mercedes follows. Frances leaves the piano and takes the steps two at a time to the bathroom, where Daddy unrolls the stocking that’s stuck to Lily’s tiny foot and Mercedes gets the carbolic acid. Lily doesn’t cry out at the pain, she just looks over Mercedes’ shoulder at Frances in the doorway. Frances says, “It’s okay, little gingerbread boy,” which is one of their special codes, adding, “Hayola kellu bas Helm.” Lily’s gaze does not waver as she replies, “Inshallah.” James glances at Frances in the doorway but says nothing. Mercedes bandages Lily’s foot, praying that there won’t be a scene later.
Inshallah is Lily’s magic word. It is from the language that she knows ought not to be used by day except in an emergency. Because the words are like wishes from a genie — don’t waste them. Lily has not even a rudimentary understanding of Arabic; it is, rather, dreamlike. At night in bed, long after lights-out, she and Frances speak the strange language. Their bed language. Frances uses half-remembered phrases and tells fragments of old stories, weaving them with pieces of songs, filling in the many gaps with her own made-up words that approximate the sounds of Mumma’s Old Country tongue. Lily converses fluently in the made-up language, unaware which words are authentic, which invented, which hybrid. The meaning resides in the music and the privacy of their magic carpet bed. Arabian Nights.
Later that evening, when Mercedes has gone into the kitchen to make cocoa for everyone, Lily slips off Daddy’s lap in the wingback chair without waking him and quietly asks Frances to redo her bandage: Mercedes has wrapped it a little too tightly.
Sweet Sixteen
Frances has grown an inch and a half. She is now five feet tall and old enough to quit school. And she would, except that Daddy will not hear of it. Frances wants to get out in the world and garner some practical experience so she can join the French Foreign Legion as a nurse. She wants to cross the desert disguised as a camel driver by day and a seductress by night, smuggling secret documents to the Allies. Mata Hari and her seven veils. Except that Frances would escape the firing squad at the last second. But Daddy only ever has one response regardless of the extravagance of Frances’s ambitions: “Even spies — especially spies — need an education.”
Frances has already shamed Mercedes by flunking two grades. Not that it makes much difference, seeing’s how they were both put ahead a year when they started, owing to the fact that they could already read and do long division. So by Frances’s calculations she has really only flunked one grade.
Frances always sat at the back of the class with the hulking boys until the teacher realized it was best to move her up front. She has become pretty tight with the Corneliuses. Cornelius the younger has turned out nice, his friends call him Puss-Eye. Everyone expects him to be a priest because no one can imagine him as a miner or a soldier. Cornelius the older is nasty, his nickname is Petal. Frances saw Petal’s thing three years ago but she has never shown him hers. From Petal, Frances extorted forbidden information and cigarettes in exchange for false hope. Petal always thought Frances was going to let him demonstrate his lessons one of these days, but Frances would just tell him, “You’re nothing but a brute. Piss off.” Petal quit school last year and moved to Vermont to cut wood and terrorize Americans, so aside from Puss-Eye and Mercedes, who don’t count, Frances is without a worthy ally at Mount Carmel. Unless you can call Sister Saint Eustace Martyr an ally.
She is the principal and therefore Frances’s arch-enemy. Not because she has threatened to expel Frances, but because she refuses to. And how else is Frances going to get out of school? Frances has done many bad things to this end. None of them, however, seems to have been quite bad enough for Sister Saint Eustace, a woman whose faith — judging by her belief in Frances — could move mountains.
“You have God-given ability, Frances. When are you going to apply yourself?”
Silence. Smell of beeswax. Frances fidgets.
Sister persists. “There are scholarships available for bright students, but you’ll have to buckle down and start achieving consistently.”
“Yes, Sister Saint Useless, thank you.”
Frances thinks Sister Saint Eustace does not notice.
Or: “Why do you do these things, Frances?” This could refer to anything from theft or defacement of other people’s property, to reducing a fellow pupil to tears by telling her that her parents have just been killed in an automobile accident, “Your mother’s head came right off.”
“Why, Frances? When we know that deep down you’re a good girl.”
“I’m sorry, sister. I’ll try to behave in a way that’s worthy of all the special efforts you make on my behalf.”
“What about what’s worthy of you, Frances?”
Silence. Frances glances up at poor disappointed Jesus on the cross. She glances down at her nicotine fingers.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Frances?”
“A cabaret parasite.”
Sister’s expression does not change. Frances grows beet-red under the beady blue gaze. Finally: “You know, Frances, sometimes it’s the wildest girls who end up with the strongest vocations.”
No way, no way I’m being a nun.
“But you don’t have to become a nun to get a good education and pursue a satisfying career. Women can do anything nowadays. You’re an intelligent girl, Frances. The world is your oyster.”
Yeah, slimy and smelly.
Frances wonders, what will it take to get free? Because all Sister Saint Eustace does is poke at an old and tender bruise that reminds Frances what a bad apple she really is.
Frances has been going stir-crazy waiting for her life to begin. She has cut the sleeves off most of her dresses and shortened them herself — uneven is all the rage. She has decided she has a perfect figure, which is none. She removes the ribbons from her braids and ties them around her forehead and she has experimented with the bejewelled-brow look, courtesy of Mercedes’ opal rosary. In the toe of an odd stocking in her drawer she keeps a tube of Rose of Araby lipstick she swiped from MacIsaac’s. She has scorched her hair in an effort to straighten it, and always before her mind’s eye is Louise Brooks, with her jet-black shingle and fringe.
Louise Brooks has usurped Lillian Gish in Frances’s heart and on her wall. Lillian survives now only in an honorary capacity, alone on her virginal ice-floe. Louise smoulders from beneath a black widow’s veil, smirks in a tuxedo, flirts over the rim of a champagne glass, simpers on Jack the Ripper’s knee, and sprawls in a wicked he
ap, naked but for a handful of feathers. She is the best and the worst girl in the world. She is also the most modern. Frances longs to be sold into a “life of sin,” forced onto the stage and into “houses of ill fame” where life is tragic but so much fun.
In the meantime, she plays hookey down by the shore or at the picture-house. Lately she has taken to walking and trotting the Shore Road all nine miles into Sydney, where she heads for the docks of the Esplanade and hangs around the ships. She’s thinking about stowing away. She chats with merchant sailors from all over the world and entertains them with her own skinnamalink stepdance-Charleston for pennies. Lets the odd nasty one touch her chest for a quarter before taking to her heels.
The only thing that keeps Frances from running away is Lily. She has to make sure that Lily is okay before she can let her life begin. What “okay” means is not clear. Frances will know it when she sees it. For now, she contents herself with a fresh diversion: on November 12, she follows James to his secret place in the woods:
It was difficult because she didn’t have a car to follow him in and, besides, he would notice that. So she went on the floor of the back seat of his Hupmobile, under a blanket.
When the car stops, she hears him get out. Then she hears another automobile drive up. Sounds like a truck. She hears James’s voice and another man’s, soft and deep. She waits until their footsteps scuff away, then she carefully rises and peeps out the window. There’s a shack with smoke coming out the top of a tin chimney — I was right!