Mercedes has become very sleepy thinking about Bernadette. As her eyes drift down from the picture they naturally fall upon the figurine of the dear Old-Fashioned Girl. Mercedes’ eyes lurch open. Diabolical.
The Old-Fashioned Girl has a parasol for a head and a head for a parasol. She is daintily holding up her own head of ringlets to the sun while the insensate yellow parasol is implanted in the empty neck like a flag. Frances.
Mercedes blinks back tears. It’s always like this — the minute I have something good, something clean. She goes to the dresser, tidying her tears with a thin trembling wrist.
She examines the body. The pieces have been glued like that, there’s no fixing this. At least not now. What to do with it, where to put it in the meantime where it won’t be like an obscene smell, invisible yet oppressive. The hope chest. It’s been kept locked ever since Frances dressed Trixie in the baptismal gown. Mercedes has the key.
She picks up the disfigurine without looking at it. It tinkles briefly. On the way, she picks up the photo of Kathleen, intending to replace it between the leaves of Jane Eyre, but Jane has flown. She is not on the shelf near the window. She is nowhere to be seen. Frances must have borrowed her. Again.
First things first. Mercedes will hunt for the book later. She puts Kathleen in her pocket and walks to the foot of the attic stairs. Listens. Silence. She mounts the stairs.
The attic is so empty. Nothing but the hope chest. Even the attic’s one other distinguishing feature is an absence: a criss-cross halfway up the wall where a crucifix used to be. Mercedes remembers when this was Kathleen’s bedroom. Before she died here, peacefully in her sleep.
The hope chest is a good place to store things like the ruined Old-Fashioned Girl because the attic is so separate from the rest of the house. In a state of perpetual quarantine. It’s really an abandoned room. That’s why the sad feeling here, Mercedes supposes. Sad like a deconsecrated church. Maybe I’ll put a crucifix back up here if I think of it next time. Or no, because then you couldn’t store anything up here like the ruined Old-Fashioned Girl. Mercedes sees the practical benefit of having a non-room in the house.
She opens the hope chest. The cedar smell clouds up soft and alive, resurrecting an old grief. Mercedes has no wish to linger here or to rummage in the past. She takes what is to hand — the baptismal gown is at the top of the pile from the Trixie incident — and wraps the Old-Fashioned Girl in it. After what the garment has been through this can hardly be considered a desecration. She closes the lid and locks it. She stands for a moment in the emptiest of rooms. Then leaves, quietly closing the door behind her.
Mercedes feels calmer by the time she arrives in the living-room. Daddy will be home soon and she musn’t show that anything’s wrong. She sits down at the piano. No doubt Lily knocked over the figurine by accident, she is a child after all — jab jab jab at that sticky C sharp, Daddy keeps saying he’s going to fix it but never does — Mercedes is under the impression that she has forgiven Lily for the family-tree incident and now she is preparing herself to forgive Frances for mutilating the Old-Fashioned Girl. She turns to page thirty-two in Everybody’s Favorite Songs. Oddly, Mercedes has always found it much easier to forgive Frances than to forgive Lily, even though Frances is satanically inspired and Lily is unarguably innocent. Mercedes needs to forgive Frances the same way Frances needs to comfort Lily.
Mercedes goes to touch down lightly on the keys but stops and reaches into her pocket, where she has forgotten Kathleen. She takes the photo out and props it on the music ledge next to the song book. Kathleen in her Holy Angels uniform, hands on her knees, laughing. She was beautiful. A slight blur around her hair because she wouldn’t keep still long enough for the camera. There, says Mercedes to Kathleen with her mind, you can listen and watch and I’ll play you a song.
Mercedes starts to play. And to sing sincerely:
“‘Darling I am growing old. Silver threads among the gold, shine upon my brow today, life is fading fast away. But, my darling you will be, will be, always young and fair to me. Yes! My darling you will be, always young and fair to me.’”
Trixie, Frances, then Lily quietly file in. Lily’s face is black with coal except for a wide oval around her mouth. Mercedes sees them but keeps singing. Frances looks at Mercedes and figures, I guess she hasn’t been up to her room yet.
Frances, Lily and Trixie sit on the sofa and listen.
“‘With the roses of the May, I will kiss your lips and say, Oh! My darling mine alone, You have never older grown.’”
Daddy is in the doorway. The song ends.
“That was lovely, Mercedes.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
“Play something else my dear,” he says, crossing the room to sit in the wingback chair.
“Play ‘Oh My Darlin’ Clementine’,” Lily requests.
“What in the name of time have you done to your face?”
“We did a minstrel show in the cellar, Daddy,” says Lily.
James looks at Frances. Frances just looks back. Daddy smiles at Lily,
“Come here ya wee scallywag.”
Lily jumps into Daddy’s lap.
“Go on and play, Mercedes.”
Mercedes plays and Daddy and Lily sing, cuddled together in the wingback chair. Frances watches them as though transfixed. Lily belts out her favourite part, “‘herring boxes without topses, shoes they were for Clementine.’” Lily always wonders what happened to Clementine, the miner forty-niner’s daughter, “lost and gone for ever,” where?
The song comes to an end; Daddy gently shifts Lily off his knee and rises.
“Tell you what, Mercedes, I’m going to fix that C sharp right this minute.”
“Oh thank goodness, Daddy, it’s so annoying.” Mercedes is a lady. She is able to chat with Daddy like that. Frances marvels. James opens the piano lid and looks in. “Give it a tap, Mercedes.”
She does.
“Nothin’ to it,” says James, “I’ll get my tools.” Then he sees the photograph. The laughing leaning-forward girl with the halo of hurry, “Daddy!” The house is behind her and you can just see Materia in the kitchen window waving. Something bright in her hand. Flashed against the lens. James can hear Kathleen laughing at him, totally unafraid, nothing to be afraid of. Not like now in this room. Now is the dim past. Then was the shining present. He hears her laugh. He hears the water trickling in the creek and flash goes Materia’s waving hand, although her face is barely visible. Kathleen is fourteen. You think you’re safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you’ll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.
If only he hadn’t let her go so far from home. If only he had gone with her to New York. None of it would have happened. She never would have got pregnant. Not that I regret Lily, Lily is my consolation, but my first girl…. She’d be with me now. Oh my darlin’. The breath assaults James’s lungs and he comes out of the black and white picture back into the room of living colour.
And looks around. My good daughter. My bad daughter. And my dear daughter’s daughter — in blackface. That isn’t even worth getting riled about, although riled is what Frances tries to get me with something like that.
“What’s this doing here?” he asks Mercedes, softly. There are no pictures of Kathleen anywhere. Not a spinning wheel in the kingdom, so to speak, and then you prick your finger.
Mercedes answers, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Frances stares at James. “I did it.”
Mercedes swivels on the piano stool. She wants to say to Frances, no, it will go much harder with you, you don’t have to atone for the ruin of my silly possessions by taking the blame for this. But Frances deliberately digs her own grave. “Kathleen was my sister and I’d like to see her now and then.”
James is getting whiter. The blue part of his eyes is heating up.
Frances stokes him. “Why can’t we, anyhow? Was there somethi
ng wrong with her? Was she a lunatic or something?” Casual insolent tone.
Mercedes can’t find her voice. It’s autumn in her mouth and all her tongue can do is rustle. Lily doesn’t like it when Daddy looks at Frances like that. It’s not Daddy any more. Not her daddy.
“Was she a slut?” Frances, in a helpful tone of voice. Ahhh, that’s just right. Look at him, all lit up like an Easter candle.
James says quietly to Frances, “Come with me.”
Frances shrugs and gets up, nonchalant, grinning at Mercedes. Mercedes covers her face with her hands. James says to Mercedes, “Take your sister out for a while.”
“Come on, Lily.”
Lily’s forehead has the bump in it but she obeys.
Frances saunters across the room towards James, who finally snaps at the sight of her slouching towards him, grabs the back of her neck and flings her through the doorway. Mercedes hustles Lily out the front door.
“Where are we going, Mercedes?”
“Out.”
“I broke your beautiful thing.”
“I don’t care, Lily, just walk please” — down the porch steps.
“Frances glued it but I broke it and I tore up your book too, I didn’t mean to.”
“They’re just things, Lily, they don’t matter.”
Lily is having a hard time keeping up but she has no choice, Mercedes has her by the wrist.
“I’m sorry, Mercedes.”
No answer.
“Mercedes —”
“That’s enough, Lily.”
They walk-drag through town until they come to the cliff above the shore. Mercedes stands staring out at the grey sea. Lily sits with her legs dangling over the edge.
“How come I never saw that picture?”
“You know perfectly well, because Daddy doesn’t like to dwell on Kathleen. It grieves him.”
“Did you hide it?”
“Yes. In the book you destroyed. That’s how it came to be out in the open.”
“That’s the book Frances likes to read. That’s how come I accidentally wrecked it. Because Frances accidentally made me.”
“Well, then. She has you to thank for whatever Daddy gives her.”
“How come you put the picture on the piano, Mercedes?”
Mercedes freezes. How come indeed? Surely not on purpose. Mercedes turns her head slowly and looks at Lily. She sees her falling over the cliff to the rocks below. The only thing that would not break would be her withered leg in its steel brace.
Without looking at Mercedes, Lily rises and wanders back towards the Shore Road. She turns to see if Mercedes is coming, but Mercedes is kneeling at the precipice, facing the ocean.
“Mercedes,” she calls. “Don’t fall, Mercedes.”
Mercedes makes the sign of the cross and gets up. God will forgive her. She has made Him a promise.
On Water Street, the outside walls of the shed thump now and then like a bass drum with a foot-pedal at work inside it keeping the beat. In the shed the performance has begun. The upbeat grabs her neck till she’s on point, the downbeat thrusts her back against the wall, two eighth-notes of head on wood, knuckles clatter incidentally. In the half-note rest he lights up her pale face with the blue wicks of his eyes, and the lyrics kick in con spirito, “What right have you, you have no right, no right to even speak her name, who’s the slut, tell me who’s the slut!” The next two bars are like the first, then we’re into the second movement, swing your partner from the wall into the workbench, which catches her in the small of the back, grace-note into stumble because she bounces, being young. Staccato across the face, then she expands her percussive range and becomes a silent tambourine. Frances gets through this part by pretending to herself that she’s actually Raggedy-Lily-of-the-Valley, which makes her laugh and provokes his second verse, “I don’t want to hear you speak her name,” accidental note to the nose resolves into big major chord, “Do — You — Under — Stand — Me?” We’ve gone all stately; it’s whole notes from here on in. She flies against another wall and he follows her trajectory, taking his time now because we’re working up to the finale. One more clash of timbers and tissues and it’s finally opera, “I’ll cut the tongue right out of your head.” She sticks her tongue out at him and tastes blood. Cue finale to the gut. Frances folds over till she’s on the floor. Modern dancer.
The first thing Mercedes did was bring Frances Spanish Influenza and the rest of her dear children, arranging them lovingly on her bed. Even though Frances didn’t register their arrival, Mercedes knew their presence would comfort her. Then she got a basin and a cloth and cleaned Frances’s face.
The swelling makes Frances look even younger than sixteen, especially with all her dolls around her. She speaks finally, her words a little thick. “Where’s Trixie?”
“It’s okay, Trixie’s fine.”
Frances hurts all over, which makes her feel restful. It’s a lovely feeling that she hardly ever gets.
Mercedes squeezes out the cloth, “You shouldn’t make him angry like that.”
“He deserves it.”
“You’re the one who gets hurt.”
Frances swallows carefully. “I’m sorry about your things.”
“It’s all right, Frances. You didn’t have to take the blame for the photograph.”
“Yes I did.”
“Why?”
“It’s the way it is, Mercedes. You can’t change the way it is.”
“I don’t agree, that doesn’t make any sense, he shouldn’t beat you for something I did.”
“Well, he wouldn’t beat you.”
“Well good, then, no one need have got beaten.”
“Yes, someone did need to. Besides, it lets me get back at him.”
“For what?”
Frances looks at Mercedes and smiles slightly, which makes the fresh seam in her lower lip gleam.
“For the thing you don’t know. And what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
Mercedes says nothing. Frances reaches for Diphtheria Rose, hugs her and closes her eyes.
Mercedes has told Daddy that the picture has been burnt to nothing on the stove. But it’s a lie. She can’t part with it. She leaves Frances sleeping, but before going to the coal cellar to keep her promise to God, she climbs the attic stairs for the second time today. Mercedes knows that Daddy never looks in the hope chest. The photo will be perfectly safe there.
When the house is quiet, Trixie lopes up the stairs into Frances and Lily’s room and silently leaps onto the bed. She snuggles down amongst the dolls in the crook of Frances’s arm. She watches Frances sleep for a while. Then she lays her head upon the pillow, extends her paw and rests it against Frances’s forehead. Neither of them moves till morning.
We Are the Dead
… All by myself I have to go
With none to tell me what to do
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountainsides of dreams …
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
“THE LAND OF NOD”
An opening in the earth a third of the way up a steep slope of limestone, thin grass and scant soil. Crazy pine trees grow parallel to the slant here and there. An archway in the earth. No inscription. An abandoned bootleg mine. A drift mine, the type that cuts into a hill-face and burrows horizontally.
Every time people find an old mine around here, they think they’ve found the old French mine. There’s no treasure associated with the old French mine, it just happened to be the first hole excavated for the purpose of extracting “buried sunshine”. This is the sort of thing that becomes important when you don’t have cathedrals.
“It’s the old French mine,” says Frances. “No one else knows it’s here.”
Frances and Lily stand at the base of the hill looking up. Behind them are the woods, where Frances has just blazed a trail in the pine trees with the kitchen scissors. She brings a hand up to shade her eyes in the manner of a French Foreign Legion commander, the overcast Cape Bre
ton sky notwithstanding. Her left eye socket has healed to pale yellow, but her right one is still a pouchy mauve — wounds sustained in my last hand-to-hand bout with the Algerians, mon Dieu!
Frances cuts what she intends to be a plucky figure in her blue Girl Guide uniform. Her neckerchief is neatly knotted, her beret tweaked at regulation angle, her leather pouch buckled to her belt. The only things missing are badges. She has yet to earn one. She has yet to attend a second guide meeting. Lily is in her Brownie uniform. Daddy has finally let her join because she hasn’t had so much as a cold for a long long time. Frances was supposed to take her to her first Brownie pack meeting this afternoon, but brought her here instead. They walked all the way, and it’s miles. Frances told Lily she would earn her hiking badge.
“There are dead men in there, Lily. And diamonds.”
“Like in Aladdin.”
“That’s right.”
“Let’s go home now, Frances.”
“We’re going in.”
Frances reaches for Lily’s hand, but Lily backs away. “Come on, Lily, just for a little visit.”
“No, Frances, there’s dead people in there.”
“Dead people are completely harmless.”
“What about ghosts?”
“There’s no such thing.”