My throat closed, I couldn’t swallow the coffee. How much does she know? Does she imagine that we talk Verdi till dawn? That we plan to enter the convent together? But I said, “Thank you. It would be nice if Rose could spend some time here. Her home situation is not the most wholesome.”
“Poor thing. She’s welcome to stay and use the piano too, any time.”
Jesus Murphy! “Gosh,” I said, “that’s awfully generous of you, Giles.”
“No, Kathleen. It’s selfish.” She twinkled at me, sipped her coffee and crinkled the newspaper. I decided not to look a gift-horse in the mouth.
“No wonder people in Cape Cod thought I was crazy,” thought Lily. “No one would ever mistake the Island of Manhattan for any other place once they’d seen it.”
The highway had become Broadway. She had crossed the Harlem River and asked, “Where’s Central Park?” This time she was confident that it was a sensible question. But people still didn’t want to answer for some reason, they looked quickly away. Finally, a big white lady with fruit on her hat said, “Come with me, child.”
Lily wound up at a mission in the East Village where a volunteer lady tried to get her into a bath and a new dress. Lily bargained, “You may wash my dress, but I do not want a new dress, and you may wash me but I will not remove my boots, thank you.”
“Your ankles are badly swollen.”
“I’ve been walking a lot.”
“You’re actually quite pretty under all that grime, aren’t you?”
“Thank you.”
“Poor little thing.”
“I’m not poor.”
“God loves you.”
“I know.”
Lily’s green silk dress began to disintegrate at the first hint of water. “This is fit for the trash,” said the lady and the next instant shrieked in pain.
“What happened?” asked the matron, who came running, and the charity worker replied, “Little bitch bit me.”
But by then Lily had her dress, her brace and her diary, and was out the door.
A pale man with long black hair, a top hat and curly sideburns pointed north.
She entered through the south gate of Central Park and found the pond as evening fell. She looked for the thicket but couldn’t find it. She found an untenanted bench, curled up, hugged the diary and fell asleep. She moved several times, awakened by the crack of a billy stick on the soles of her feet, “Move along.”
And more than once, as she rose and began to walk away, “I’m sorry, little girl, don’t you have anywhere to go?”
“Yes, thank you, don’t worry.”
“Are you all alone?”
“No. My brother is with me.”
Sept 23 — She said, “There’s a tree growing inside you.”
In my little room with the Greenwich roofs beyond the window. Red geraniums, cool metropolitan night air, industrial blue. We lie next to each other a long time, looking. Lightly touching, as involuntary as breath. Black and white. Except she thinks I’m actually green.
“There … see?” She traces the green shoots of this alleged sapling, starting from behind my ear, down my neck, where it submerges then surfaces at the base of my breast, reaching up, cleaving in two twigs to encircle my nipple. She finds more evidence at my inner thigh.
“It’s growing up to your belly button. I wonder where the roots are.”
“It depends whether I’m a shade tree, or an aquatic plant.”
“You’re green.”
“My eyes are green.”
“You’re so white, you’re green.”
“You say the sweetest things.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I’m green —”
“The Green Diva, la Diva Verde —”
“And I smell —”
“You have a scent.”
“So do you,” I said.
“What’s mine?”
“… Trade winds —”
“Ha —”
“— everything that’s ever been worth stealing.”
“Hm.”
“What’s mine?”
“… Mineral.”
“You know, it’s because I know you that I’m able to translate. I know that what you’re really saying is, ‘Darling, you’re ravishing, milk and honey are under your tongue —’”
“‘And the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.’”
“Ha!”
She kissed me. And after a while she said, “Actually, you smell like the sea.”
“What do you know from the sea, there’s no sea in New York, there’s a grubby harbour.”
“I know you.”
“Then what’s it smell like?”
“Like rocks. Like an empty house with all the windows blowing open. Like thinking, like tears. Like November.”
“What about the tree?”
“It’s the part that goes on living.”
“… Are you cold?”
“No…. Here.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m never going to leave you, Kathleen.”
“Don’t ever leave me.”
“I never will.”
November 1, 1918
Caro Diario,
This is my swan song. It’s happened. I am too happy to write any more. There is one last event to record before I kiss and close you for ever. Today the Kaiser took me to the Metropolitan Opera House.
Custodian let us in. All is calm, all is dark, awaiting the opening night of the season on November 11. The custodian raised the gold curtain and I stood centre stage on the set of Samson and Delilah and looked into the house.
Beyond the pit, the dress circle and orchestra swept out before me, a varnished sea of gilded red rushing to the back and sides of the house to meet balcony upon balcony fanning up and around me like the decks of a grand sea-going vessel. Three thousand four hundred and sixty-five passengers, not counting the crew. This afternoon there was an audience of two. Rose and the Kaiser. Centre orchestra. I sang Quando m’envo from Bohème. And received a standing ovation. I’ll sing for Gatti-Casazza on the twelfth. I’ll make my debut on this stage this time next year. But I had my maiden voyage today.
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. Thank you.
Love, Liebe, Amore,
Kathleen Cecilia Piper
Book 9
THE FAMILY TREE
“The sands of Mecca shape a rose”
THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD
The inscription in the stone archway says, “Ora Pro Nobis.” So Lily does, folding her hands on the diary in her lap and bowing her head.
She has been sitting here for the past hour reading in the doorway opposite 85 ½ 135th Street. She is glad after all that the mission lady found her because, although her dress and boots are worse for wear, Lily’s hair is clean and silky and her face is shining. Across the street, the church is still on the second floor, with four new stained-glass windows: the Holy Bible closed, the Holy Bible open, Jesus standing attended by sheep, Jesus sitting attended by sheep. The butcher shop is likewise there, renamed “Harlem’s Own Community Green Grocer and Butcher Shop,” but “Dash Daniels Harlem Gentlemen’s Emporium” has been replaced by “Joyce and Coralee’s Beauty School: Bonaparte System,” the “A2Z Auto School,” “Renaissance Book Store,” “Johnson’s Photo Studio,” “Johnson’s Barber Shop” and “R.W. J. Johnson, Notary Public”.
There are nests like this everywhere of buildings richly subdivided, bursting with business and smart signage yet flanked by those boarded up and empty, “Danger Keep Out”. The survivors seem to be clinging to each other for warmth, hoping to avoid the next sweep of the scythe through a neighbourhood where at one time there seemed never to be enough space to house the dreams, the energy
, the buzz of enterprise and thunderclaps of faith and music. More and more, Harlem depends on the tourist trade. The harder times get, the higher they get up here at a movable feast of dingy wang-dangs and a string of glittering clubs where genius enters by the back door.
Lily watches three little boys in fedoras and long coats gathered round a wooden crate playing a mysterious game. A woman dressed like some type of nun passes by and scowls at her, then does a double-take and says, “God bless you.” Little girls skip rope, there are children everywhere.
For a while now, the butcher has been leaning in his doorway across the street, considering Lily. He is a good-looking man of about thirty and he calls, “Are you waiting for someone?”
“No, sir.”
He smiles. “Who’s your momma, girl, where’s she at?”
Lily smiles back — not since Cape Breton has she heard words to that effect.
“She’s dead.”
He nods. “You hungry? You look hungry.”
“It’s all right, thank you, I’m expected.”
Lily rises, crosses the street and walks past him up the steps, through the stone archway and into the cool vaulted foyer. Up the stairs, her brace ringing out on the worn white marble. Second-floor church on the left. Lily pops her head in just to see what a Baptist church looks like. Three older ladies are cleaning and yakking, but stop dead when the oldest one looks up to see Lily’s head enquiring round the door and screams the way anyone would if the Devil showed up in church. The other two women cry, “Sweet Jesus!” “Dear Redeemer on the Cross!” — they would bless themselves but they’re not Catholic.
Lily withdraws, “Excuse me.”
The bravest lady steals over to the door and watches Lily climb towards the third floor. Then she turns to her cronies and explains, “That red-haired devil who ruined our Miss Rose has come back to life as a shrunk-down raggedy cripple.”
It’s true.
Third floor. Open doors, a gauntlet of staring faces, mostly children, an old young woman on the verge of barking out the usual interrogation till she sees it’s a lame girl. Hostility is replaced by curiosity. Lily makes her lopsided way in a wake of whispers and one giggle followed by the sound of a slap. Apartment Three. Lily knocks. And waits, turning to her audience, now silent. She smiles. The old young woman shoos the kids back into her apartment and slams the door. Lily knocks again. She knows there’s someone home, she can hear a piano — soft, one-handed, as though that hand had fallen asleep and were now dreaming.
She knocks a third time. And finally gets a muffled reply: “Fuck off.”
Lily puts her mouth to the crack of the door and formulates politely, “Miss Lacroix? It’s Lily Piper. I’ve come to visit you, and I have something for you.”
Silence.
Lily waits. It’s a long silence but far from empty. Finally the scrape of a chair. Slow, firm footfalls. A voice just on the other side of the door says, “There’s no Miss Lacroix here.”
Lily waits.
The door opens. A man looks down at her. His face is all angles, handsome and severe, he’s perhaps a bit too lean. Black hair shorn to the scalp, long neck, white shirt open at the throat. His baggy black trousers are worn to a shine, his impossibly articulated hands dangle, waiting to get back to their real life. But his eyes say he’s forgotten music for the moment.
Lily waits while he looks and looks. One of his hands rises and a finger touches Lily’s forehead — traces her eyelid, cheek, lips, chin. The man is crying. Lily asks, “May I come in?”
She enters when the man steps back. He closes the door behind her and she stands in the middle of the room looking round. There is a piano, a piano bench, one chair and a table. Lily turns back to the man and says, “Hello, Rose.”
Rose takes a half-step towards her. Lily approaches. Rose puts forth her hands, slowly fingering the air as though searching for something in a dark wardrobe. Lily enters the embrace. When Rose shakes and shudders, Lily does not let her stumble. While Rose grieves, Lily takes more and more weight — she has held people up before when they were stricken and besides, she is in good shape from her walk.
Rose soaks Lily’s neck and shoulder and groans into her ear as though something jagged and wrong were being drawn out of her body. She moans, “Oh no, no, no,” because for Rose it has just happened.
It’s important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.
“No, no, no….”
Lily pats Rose gently on the back, the way you would a baby. Rose whimpers into her shoulder, “I’m sorry.”
But what has she to be sorry for? A body doesn’t need a reason to feel sorry. Sorry is a free-floating commodity.
“I love you,” says Rose.
“I know.”
“Never leave you.”
“It’s okay.”
“Kathleen.”
The word becomes a keening and Rose crumples in agony at the extraction of that last mortal shard. It’s the one that hurts the worst, she tried to leave it where it was so it could kill her slow and numb, that last lethal fragment. Her name.
Lily guides Rose to the floor retching, past crying, until finally she begins to rock on her heels.
“It’s okay. It’s all right now, Rose.”
And Rose takes her first unfettered breath.
Lily has made tea. She pours some hot into Rose’s cup and asks, “Why didn’t you save her?”
Rose could retreat to her usual safe cynical distance, but at this moment she can’t remember what she ever had to lose or gain. She answers the question.
“I wrote and my letters came back unopened. I figured to hell with her. That’s ’cause I wanted to think she was the one sending them back. I couldn’t believe anyone could lock her up. Even though I’d seen her father.”
Lily doesn’t ask.
Rose stirs and stirs her tea, looking down until she picks up the thread again. “She always did what she wanted, you see. That was the great thing. It was better to think she was finished with me than to think anything could get the better of her. I thought, give her a couple months, she’ll be back — her brilliant career, you know. She could quit me but not her music….” Rose looks up. “But she didn’t come back. By the time I got money for a train ticket to that what the hell island —”
“Cape Breton.”
“Yeah,” smiling, “‘C’Bre’n’ — Giles found me and told me she was dead. Never said nothing ’bout babies. Said flu.”
Rose looks out the window at a line of small clothes. Lily says, “You could’ve walked.”
“Yeah. I could’ve walked.”
They sit in silence for a bit. Then Lily asks, “What’s the date today?”
“I don’t know. June something — twenty-first. No, twentieth.”
“It’s my birthday.”
Rose squeezes shut her eyes for a moment. Then opens them. Her voice is kind when she speaks. “Happy birthday, Lily.”
“I’m supposed to be at Lourdes.”
“You don’t say.”
There’s a charcoal fedora with an emerald band hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Lily goes and gets it and hands it to Rose.
“Would you play me something?”
Rose sets the hat beside her on the bench, and plays.
When there is finally more silence than music, Lily looks up and says, “Thank you.”
Rose returns to her cold tea and watches as Lily unbuckles her brace, pulls off her boots and turns them upside-down on the table. A wadded heap: when the maple leaves wore out, Lily lined the sole of her left boot with newspaper photos of President Roosevelt because she trusted him, and reinforced her right sole with promises of “a new deal”. The rest of the wrinkled papers on the table bear the likeness of King George V, which is why it takes Rose a moment to register the fact of three thousand dollars in hundreds.
“Wha
t do you figure it’s worth in American money?” asks Lily.
“Where the hell’d you get this, child?”
Lily answers, “My sister Frances.”
Rose nods and smiles and says, “Everybody should have a sister Frances.”
St Anthony, Patron Saint of Lost Objects
The beautiful colour print of Bernadette and Our Lady of Lourdes has been nicely framed. It hangs over the blackboard in Mercedes’ classroom at Mount Carmel High School. Mercedes never tires of telling the wonderful story of Bernadette, nor does she let many weeks go by without quizzing the class at random — “And how many times did Our Lady appear to Bernadette?” Bernadette is a saint now. She was canonized on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1933 — the year Lily went away. “And what did Our Lady answer when Bernadette asked, ‘Who are you?’”
Mercedes stands ramrod-straight on her platform at the front of the class, anticipating the forties in her economy of line and preference for angles. April 1939.
“What’s wrong with this sentence?”
She raps the blackboard with her pointer, taut hickory, parade-square quality. Chalked in her textbook longhand: Do like your mother says.
Her grade tens. Seventeen of them. God knows there’ll be few enough by the time they hit grade twelve, and likely not a single boy among the graduating class. Only three left now. One of them, Bernie “Moose” Muise, shoots up his hand. Mercedes casts a withering eye and purses her lips, unaware that this has made her an easy school yard take-off. Who am I? Old leather-lips!
“Well, Bernard?”
“See miss, it’s like this: if every girl did like her mother said, the population of Cape Breton Island would be cut in half.”
A burst of laughter bitten off and swallowed short by the class. Nervous titters as Mercedes strolls to the big boy’s desk — he’s grinning, actually kinda fond of old leather-lips. The blows rain down on him hard and fast, a hickory blur, before he can get his arms over his head he’s bleeding from an eye, occasioning a new nickname.
“You need a bit of a rest, Mercedes.”