“What’s wrong, Mercedes?”
“Nothing at all, Lily.”
Mercedes permits herself to relax a little. She leans back in her chair and observes with satisfaction the flawless table manners of her family. She basks in their warm but civilized conversation. Everyone, it seems, has had an interesting day. Frances apportions second helpings. Lily reaches with her napkin and removes a spot of food from the left corner of James’s mouth, a small service for which neither thanks nor embarrassment is required. All quiet at the kitchen table.
Frances pours boiling water into the teapot and Mercedes is alarmed to notice James catch sight of himself in the kettle. Bristling with braids. The right side of his mouth breaks into a smile big enough to make up for the left side having lost the knack, and he laughs so hard that he falls dangerously silent between wheezy exhalations. Frances and Lily laugh too, until their throats ache and the tears stream, elbows thunking onto the table rattling the cutlery. Even Mercedes joins in and, once started, is unable to stop even after the others have recovered, then caught it again from her.
Exhausted, they fortify themselves with a pan of succulent Nellie’s Muffins straight from the oven. They sip tea. Listen to the rain. Outside, the whole world is hungry and forlorn. But in here is a little island of contentment.
At last, Mercedes thinks, we are a family. Daddy is senile, Frances is crazy, Lily is lame and I’m unmarried. But we are a family. Soon to be one more. And for the first time it crosses Mercedes’ mind to keep Frances’s child.
Certain Effects
“Frances,” said James after the glorious Lebanese supper, “come here. I have something for you.”
Frances joined him in the front room. She sat on the piano bench and he handed her the white tissue-paper bundle.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“One or two things that belonged to your sister Kathleen.” Then he left the room.
Frances fishes a new candle from a kitchen drawer. She walks up the attic stairs, where the voices are louder than ever. She pauses, wishing they would speak one at a time and stop yelling. “I’m listening,” she says. But the hollow din rages on, so she continues up.
Now she and Trixie sit on the floor of the attic with the lighted candle. Frances looks down at the bundle in her lap. She parts the tissue folds. Lying on top of a soft pile is an old exercise notebook. The cover is imprinted with the Union Jack, the flag of Nova Scotia and the crest of Holy Angels Convent School. In a space marked “Name:” a grandiose signature spells “Kathleen Piper”. And in the space marked “Subject:” in equally florid strokes, “La vie en rose!”
Frances picks up the notebook. Turns to the last page first, and reads:
O Diary. My loyal friend. There is love, there is music, there is no limit, there is work, there is the precious sense that this is the hour of grace when all things gather and distil to create the rest of my life. I don’t believe in God, I believe in everything. And I am amazed at how blessed I am.
Then Frances turns back to the first page and begins:
8 pm, February 29, 1918, New York City
Dear Diary,
No, I will not use that form of address. That is a relic of childhood. This book will serve as a record of my progress as a singer. I will record only relevant facts which will prove useful as my training progresses. No gush….
Wax drips from the guttering candle-stub by the time Frances arrives once more at the last page. She closes the diary. “Goodnight, Kathleen.”
She turns her attention to what remains in the tissue-paper package.
Then she opens the hope chest.
The next day, James joins Frances on the veranda.
“Are you warm enough?”
“Yes thanks, Daddy.”
But he has brought an old tartan blanket and spreads it over her and Trixie anyway. “There.” He sits to the right of her on a kitchen chair next to her camp cot. He looks off at nothing in particular and starts talking, “I went down to New York because I got a letter.”
Frances doesn’t interject. She doesn’t look at him. She knows he will fly away if she does that, so she relaxes and listens to his story.
“It was the day of the Armistice. I got off at Grand Central Station and I walked all the way to where she was staying because I couldn’t get a cab. There were crowds. I didn’t know the war had ended….”
He trails off. They sit still and silent for a long comfortable time until he says to the middle distance, “Well it’s time I did a tap of work.” He picks up his cane and shuffles off to the shed. Trixie follows.
It takes six days. Mercedes leaves them each morning on the veranda and every afternoon she sees them when she returns up the street. It’s as though they hadn’t moved — although Lily assures her that they have been duly fed and watered. They look so peaceful sitting side by side, with their eyes settled on separate pieces of sky. Like old friends. Daddy and Frances.
Mercedes would like to sit and chat with an old friend, but she doesn’t have one. She had Helen Frye. And most of, all she had Frances. Where is Frances now?
Mercedes can see James’s lips moving as she approaches. What is he telling Frances? Day after day? He has always fallen silent by the time Mercedes is within earshot.
Walking home from school up Water Street on the chill seventeenth of November, Mercedes can see his breath. He is talking and talking, but by the time she reaches the veranda his words have given up their steamy ghosts. She greets them as usual on her way into the house, and finally hears something.
“How did the babies get in the creek, Daddy?”
Mercedes freezes on the threshold. Then walks briskly into the hall and, without removing her coat, runs up the stairs to her room. She leans against her door, slips a hand inside her blouse and feels for her opal rosary.
James reaches out his curled left hand without looking. He finds Frances’s head and bonks it, saying kindly by way of answer, “That’s all over and done with.”
“I was there,” says Frances. “Wasn’t I?”
James rises. “Think I’ll do a tap of work.” And makes his slow way to the shed. His story is done.
Frances stays looking at the sky in fifteen shades of grey.
Benny Luvovitz takes James and Lily out in a sleigh and helps James cut down just the right tree.
On her way home from school, Mercedes opens MacIsaac’s jingle-bell door to find Frances sucking on a cinnamon stick chatting and chortling with the old man, who’s nursing a ginger beer. He looks up, “Merry Christmas, Mercedes.” His shelves are not as full as they were in better days, but he reaches down a dusty box of peanut brittle.
“Thank you, Mr MacIsaac.”
“It won’t be long now, eh?”
“What’s that?” asks Mercedes.
“The great event.” Mr MacIsaac looks at Frances and beams. Mercedes stuffs the candy into her school-bag, saying, “Come Frances, time to go home.” She forgets to buy the headache powders that she went in for.
Mercedes takes Frances’s arm and sets a rapid pace down Plummer Avenue past shop windows with nothing for sale but empty space, “for lease, for lease, for lease” — at least there are no prying eyes behind those counters.
Frances wants to pop into Luvovitz’s to buy raisins for mincemeat.
“I’ll get the raisins, Frances, you go on home. It’s cold.”
“No, I’d like to say hi.”
Mercedes has the exact change ready in her hand, but Mrs Luvovitz sets out a stool for Frances saying, “When it’s your time, taier, you call me,” and offers her expert opinion as to the sex of the infant, “You’re carrying high so probably it’s a girl, or else maybe just an extra-smart boy.” Mrs Luvovitz winks. Frances smiles and asks, “How’s Ralph?”
Mercedes picks up a tin of Magic Baking Powder to avoid Mrs Luvovitz’s mortifyingly considerate glance in her direction. Mrs Luvovitz hesitates, then produces a photograph of the world’s most perfect grandson. Jean-M
arie Luvovitz.
Frances hoots, “He’s got the sticking-out ears!”
“What’re you saying, ‘sticking-out ears’, I’ll ‘sticking-out ears’ you!”
But Frances laughs and so does Mrs Luvovitz. Mercedes holds her head up and comes to the counter. She glances at the photo, then looks straight at Mrs Luvovitz and says politely, “Congratulations.”
Finally outside, Mercedes says, “It’s probably best that you not leave the house these days, Frances. It’s too cold for you to be out traipsing, you’ll catch your death.”
Frances doesn’t answer. She turns up Ninth Street.
“Frances.” Where on earth —? Oh good Lord.
Frances knocks on Helen Frye’s door. Mercedes watches from the darkness of the street as the door opens and Helen appears in the square of light. Frances turns sideways, setting off her shameless silhouette, and looks back towards Mercedes as though waiting for her. Mercedes sees Helen slowly raise her hand in greeting. But Mercedes makes no move in reply. After a moment, Helen’s hand drops once more to her side. Mercedes hears Frances say, “Merry Christmas, Helen.”
Frances rejoins Mercedes in the street and they turn homeward again. Frances slips an arm through Mercedes’. Mercedes shivers.
At home, Daddy and Lily have begun decorating the tree. “This time next year, there’ll be a wee holy terror crawling under the tree,” says James, painstakingly threading a kernel of popcorn. Frances starts baking. In the front room, Mercedes catches sight of a cheque on the piano; made out by James in his wavery handwriting, to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Relief Fund — three zeroes. She crumples it up and tosses it into the fire. Bootleg money or no, this family cannot survive on a female junior teacher’s salary. Daddy may wish to ease his conscience by giving away his ill-gotten gains, but Mercedes puts the welfare of her family first. Someone’s got to.
Immediately after supper that evening, Mercedes pleads homework and a headache, and retires upstairs. A small lie. It’s not her head that hurts. Once in her room, she switches off the light and lies fully clothed on her bed. She can hear Christmas carols from downstairs — Frances at the piano, singing along with Daddy and Lily, “‘God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…. ’” Tears fill Mercedes’ eyes. It is not fair that Frances should bask in Daddy’s affection and the approval of sundry shopkeepers for something that ought to have her hiding her face in shame. It is not fair that Sister Saint Eustace managed to make Mercedes feel like the bad one — when everyone knows that she’s the good one. It is not fair that Frances will have a baby, while Mercedes was denied a husband. None of it is fair, but that is not why Mercedes is weeping freely against her pillow. She does not begrudge Frances the new affection she has inspired on all sides — Mercedes was the first to love Frances, after all. She knows she could even find the strength to bear the mortification of raising the child. But she cannot bear to lose Frances. And that’s what hurt this evening on their walk home. The new Frances is no longer a wayward child. Or even a scarlet woman. The new Frances is at home everywhere — especially in her own growing body — and does not lack for friends. Everyone seems to think that motherhood is the best thing that could possibly happen to her. Everyone but Mercedes. For she knows that once Frances has a child, Frances will no longer need a mother.
Mercedes covers her face with her arm and allows her heart to open up along its oldest wound. Where will my baby Frances go? She will disappear. She will die and I’ll have no one to love and look after. Little Frances will become a forlorn ghost child, crying on the stairs at night, cold and transparent, with her fuzzy golden braids and her brave stare, “It doesn’t hurt.” And I won’t be able to comfort her.
Mercedes cries until she is dry and empty once more. Then she rises and sits on the edge of her bed. Downstairs they’re singing “O Holy Night”. She reaches into the drawer of her night-table, finds a fresh hanky and blows her nose. She rebraids her hair in the dark. There. Don’t whine. Fix it.
January gales freeze the ocean waves mid-crest, pine trees tinkle in their glass dresses, and it’s warm inside.
“‘Hitler Appointed Chancellor.’”
Lily is scanning the headlines for James.
“There’s going to be another war,” he says. And adds another book to his wall.
Frances bellies up to the piano and plays “My Wild Irish Rose”.
“Sing, Lily,” says James, dropping into the wingback chair.
Upstairs, Mercedes studies by correspondence with Saint Francis Xavier University. Upgrading her earning power.
February will never end, but never mind.
Lily holds the newspaper at the proper distance from James’s new glasses so he can make out the photograph: Chancellor Hitler and His Holiness Pope Pius XI. Shaking hands.
“Yup,” says James. “You watch.”
And he drops off suddenly to sleep the way he does now.
March comes in like a lion.
“‘Franklin D. Roosevelt Elected President.’ Do you want to see the picture, Daddy?” Together they look at the photograph of the tall bespectacled man standing on a hustings swagged in the Stars and Stripes, waving. “‘Pledges to Put America Back on Its Feet.’”
April Fool’s Day. The morning sun floods through the attic window.
“Diphtheria Rose,” says Frances.
Lily hands her the tattered, still pretty doll. Frances holds Dippy Rose over the open hope chest, and recites: “‘Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust.’”
Frances lays her next to Spanish Influenza, Typhoid and TB Ahoy, Small Pox, Scarlet Fever and Maurice. Trixie and Lily look on reverently. On the floor next to the open hope chest, the baptismal gown is laid out.
“Music please, Lily.”
Lily winds up The Old-Fashioned Girl and sets her down to turn on the floor, her head balanced prettily on her hand. She tinkles, “‘Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in lo-o-ve wi-ith you-ou…. ’” Trixie follows the figurine with her eyes, ready to pounce should it stray from its circumference.
Frances picks up the baptismal gown and lays it gently over her dolls. “Next time I open this box, it will be to dress my baby in this gown.”
“And to get your dolls again.”
“No.”
Frances moves to lower the lid but Lily stops her halfway.
“You forgot this, Frances.”
“That’s yours, Lily.”
The photograph of Kathleen. The one that Mercedes kept in Jane Eyre until Lily tore the book apart, it seems so long ago. Lily contemplates it for a moment. Mumma is in the background, in the window.
“What’s that in Mumma’s hand?” Lily asks.
“Scissors.”
“She’s waving.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes still on the photograph, Lily sucks in her upper and lower lips by slow turns, releasing them gently through her teeth.
“This picture belongs to Mercedes,” she says, finally.
“No it doesn’t.”
“I don’t want it.” Lily looks away.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
Lily doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t look up.
“She’s your mother, Lily.”
The Old-Fashioned Girl has stopped turning but Trixie keeps watch just in case. Frances continues gently, “She died. It wasn’t your fault.”
Lily sits very still and listens, veiled by her hair which she has been wearing loose of late, it sweeps to the floor around her like a curtain of fire.
“She went to New York,” says Frances. “She was an opera singer. Something happened there. Daddy brought her home. She lay in this room and never said a word. Ambrose drowned in the creek. It was an accident. You didn’t drown, you got polio instead. I was there.”
The more Frances tells, the more she remembers. As though it were all parked, waiting behind the flimsiest of stage scenery — a scrim perhaps — and suddenly exposed by a trick of light; the countryside
dissolving to reveal the battlefield, present all along.
“The night you were born. I don’t know why I brought you to the creek. I loved you. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you. I carried you into the water. I held you and I prayed.” Frances strokes her belly, feeling for a kick inside, but it’s all quiet.
“Did you baptize Ambrose too?”
“Yes.”
They sit for a long moment together, not talking, breathing in the soft cedar cloud.
Frances puts The Old-Fashioned Girl back in the hope chest, then turns and looks at Lily, who is growing up.
“Lily. If you want to ask me something, I’ll tell you the truth.”
Lily has dropped the photograph of the laughing girl. She looks up.
“Ambrose loves you, Frances.”
Frances takes Lily’s hand and places it against her belly. “Here. You can feel him. He’s awake now.”
Lily feels the ripple. She presses her ear against the site.
“What do you hear, Lily?”
“The ocean.”
The car horn blasts outside; Mercedes has learned to drive. Frances and Lily go to the window and wave down. Daddy is standing by the car, leaning on his cane, he smiles up. Lily turns away from the window, intending to close the hope chest before going downstairs, but she sees that Frances has already done so. She pauses at the top of the stairs and says, “Are you coming Frances?” Frances turns and goes directly to join her sister at the top of the stairs. No need to close the hope chest, for she sees that Lily has done so already.
It’s a lovely day for the drive to Mabou. Frances would rather have had her baby here at home with Mrs Luvovitz, but she relented because it seemed to mean so much to Mercedes — “They’re equipped for emergencies, Frances, it’s safer even than going into hospital, please dear, if only for my sake.”
James stands holding the passenger door open. Mercedes pulls on a pair of kid gloves as Frances climbs in beside her.
“Frances, I have to tell you a secret.”
“What?”
“I’m pregnant too.”
Mercedes’ smile trembles for a moment, then she bursts out in a high-pitched giggle, “April Fool!”