Materia tries to think what to do. But thinking never helped in such a situation. She gets a whiff of salt air, a chill laps her cheek, she feels movement beneath her feet, the bed pitches and she is on a liner bound for New York City, the girl with the heart-of-flame hair at her side clinging to the rail. But the moment flees before Materia can get hold of it, a message telegraphed weakly over a sagging distance of time and space, every second word missing.
Materia knows now who sent Kathleen, and why. It’s her own fault God is forced to work in this way. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
Kathleen knew that her father had hit her by mistake, that he was terribly sorry. She knew he’d been working too hard and all for her sake. No harm done, the tooth settled back into the gum. She made him a card to tell him she loved him. She wrote a funny poem about “the lost chord”. They put it behind them.
The First Solution
The next night, Materia conceived Mercedes.
To her own surprise, Materia began to look forward to this child, not even caring if it was a boy. She was Hebleh again and she liked it this time. It made her feel close to her own mother, expanding body, avalanche breasts, slow thighs. Her troubles went into remission.
James still didn’t take her places, but he came alive again at night — she’s my wife, after all. Her dark body and soft mind allowed him to enjoy her in an uncomplicated way. Why did he ever look to her for conversation or mental stimulation? It was unfair of him. A man looks elsewhere for those things. James finally felt normal.
He put on a little weight; she fed him, ran his nightly bath, washed his back, licked his ear and reached into the water. He let her. He was soothed. He had outrun the demon that had leapt up in him the day he hurt Kathleen.
Materia tried to conceive in sorrow, telling herself that it was only to prevent a greater sin on her husband’s part that she acted the harlot with him, enticing him even when she was already pregnant. Lust in marriage is the same as adultery. Adultery’s a mortal sin. That’s in the Commandments. Materia prayed that God might overlook the impurity in her heart. For after all, her actions were correct.
Mercedes is born late in 1912. Materia loves her. She doesn’t have to try, she just does, it’s a Joyful Mystery. Thank you Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints. And God too.
Materia doesn’t begrudge Mrs Luvovitz a third son, Ralph, two months younger than Mercedes; maybe they’ll grow up to marry each other.
James doesn’t object or even comment when Materia gets Mercedes baptized by the priest at the Catholic church in nearby Lingan. She starts going to mass again, not just Sunday but every day. Holy water in the desert, she hadn’t known how thirsty she’d been. Materia lights candles and kneels to pray with Mercedes in her arms at the base of the beautiful eight-foot Mary. But Materia doesn’t look up. She looks straight into the ruby eyes of the grinning serpent dying under the Virgin’s foot.
Materia offers it a sacrifice. She will play only at church, and only from the hymnal. Her one concession is Mrs Luvovitz’s Yiddish songbook, which is the least she can do for a friend who has given so much. It’s the same God, after all.
Eleven months later, Mrs Luvovitz is on the spot again when Materia gives birth to Frances. Lucky thing, because Frances is set to walk out feet first. Mrs Luvovitz reaches in and turns her around. Not so much difference between a calf and a child. Frances is born with the caul. An especially good omen for an island child, being a charm against drowning.
Frances looks a little starveling and she’s bald as a post. Materia figures it’s because she conceived too soon after Mercedes, the goodness in her womb hadn’t yet been replenished. And her milk isn’t as bountiful. All the more reason to love this one too.
Frances is baptized at the Empire Theatre on Plummer Avenue. The temporary digs of the new Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church.
Mercedes is a good baby, following everything closely with her brown eyes, sleeping when she ought, wanting to hold the cup and not spill a drop. Frances laughs at seven weeks.
Along with Frances, the town is officially born in 1913. The boom town has a name now: New Waterford.
James feels the normal pride of a man with a growing family. He works double shifts but that’s a small price to pay. Those two babies are the proof. His demon is so far behind him now, he can reflect upon it: he was overworked. He hit his daughter by mistake and got terribly upset. In the ensuing panic there was a physical accident. Meaningless. Hanged men get hard-ons, for heaven’s sake.
Materia’s pregnant again.
James is glad to see that his wife has recovered her senses. No more roaming the shore, babbling. No more unnerving sights like that of his wife in the attic with her head in the hope chest, sound asleep or entranced. Never now does he hear her tormenting the piano as he comes up the walk from work. Crazy for religion, yes, but women are. And she’ll get her shape back after the baby.
The two little ones seem fine, Mercedes breastfeeding a dolly and cooing to Frances. Frances has hair now. Curly golden locks, hazel eyes with glints of laughing green, first word: “Boo!”
It rains all winter. Plummer Avenue is aptly named and runs with mud but the Pipers have plenty of coal to burn off the damp. The fire is lit and the radiators clank to life the moment Kathleen gets home from school.
Materia watches Kathleen mount the stairs to her room, then returns to the kitchen and mixes flour and water for doughboys while James washes up at the kitchen pump. She watches him head to the front room, already absorbed in his HALIFAX HERALD: News from merry old England: the Union Jack has unfolded itself over two acres of new territory every time the clock has ticked since 1880….
Five minutes later Materia wipes her hands on her apron and spot-checks James from the shadows of the front hall. Yes, he’s safely settled in the wingback chair beneath the reading lamp — Sozodont: Good for Bad Teeth, Not Bad for Good Teeth….
Materia returns to the kitchen, where supper simmers and Mercedes rocks Frances in the cradle. She sets the table. Twelve minutes later, she climbs the stairs to peer through the inch of doorway Kathleen has left open — the girl has a bad habit of lounging about in her underthings, draping herself over the side of her bed reading, wearing toe-marks into the flocked wallpaper while brushing her hair, practising different accents — yes, she’s alone. Materia silently pulls the door to, turns and descends all the way to the cellar to stoke the furnace. The house can never be hot enough for the orchid on the second floor.
Once back in the kitchen, Materia fixes a honey lemon toddy and crosses again to the front hall — James now dozing in his chair, the paper slipped to the floor, Disgruntled Serbia … — continues upstairs, opens Kathleen’s door — “Mother! Can’t you knock?” — hands the young lady her preprandial tonic and watches her sip from the steaming cup. A green vein shimmers beneath the surface of Kathleen’s lily-white neck, summoned by the heat. Another glides from the crease at her armpit, to disappear behind the genuine silk camisole. A flush spreads from her cheeks down her throat, splashing her chest.
Materia lumbers back down to the kitchen, stirs the pot and hollers, “Supper!”
James shakes off his nap and arrives at the table rubbing his hands — “Something sure smells good.”
Materia yells again for Kathleen, who saunters in loosely wrapped in a kimono — “Must you bellow? I’m right here” — slouches into a chair; “What are we having?”
Materia replies, “Boiled dinner.”
“Oh boy,” says James.
Kathleen groans, he laughs. “It’s good for ya, old buddy, put hair on your chest.”
Kathleen winces, he’s so corny.
Real Cape Breton cuisine. Potatoes, turnips, cabbage, carrots and, if you’re prosperous, plenty of pork hocks. If you’ve ever had it cooked right, your mouth waters at the thought. Materia continues to surpass herself in the kitchen, everything she touches turns to juices. She hauls the pot to the table and
ladles out big portions. Kathleen is English for the moment. “No cabbage for me, thank you, Mother dear, je refuse.”
James is amused. He watches Kathleen rearrange the food on her plate and, after a token interval, gets up and makes her a toasted cheese.
Materia eats her own supper, then she eats Kathleen’s, sopping up the broth with bread. James avoids looking at her — stooped over her plate, masticating slowly — he tries not to think it but there it is: bovine. Kathleen nibbles her cheese toast and leaves the crusts. The princess and the pea.
If James has forgotten the demon, Materia hasn’t. She saw it. It looked at her. She knows it’s coming back. Materia has two real daughters now, she loves them, so it’s all very clear. One novena gives way to another, she logs miles along the Stations of the Cross, meditates upon the Mysteries — Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious — of the rosary. Gains partial indulgences, does not hope to gain a plenary indulgence, being never free from attachment to sin despite frequent confessions.
The beautiful eight-foot Mary with her blue robe and sweet sorrowful face has been moved from Lingan to New Waterford’s newly built Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, and there, in her own grotto, she presides with her Holy Infant and serpent.
In the cool darkness, sweet chafing incense faint upon the air, Materia kneels at Our Lady’s feet and prays that James be kept free of his demon for as long as possible. She prays to the demon. And lights another candle for it.
It’s a freak spring, so hot Materia can hardly move; she’s huge. What can be in there, wonders James. Looks like she’s incubating a twelve-inch cannonball. Nonetheless, she walks to church every morning with her two children in Kathleen’s old English pram. Mrs MacIsaac watches her inch by the drugstore window and worries for her: no one should be that close to God. Mr MacIsaac beckons her in for raspberry soda. Materia declines, everything makes her queasy, but the little ones drink till they sport pink moustaches.
The bigger she gets, the harder she prays, for James has once again ceased to come near her, and Kathleen grows lovelier and more careless every day. Materia watches their heads mutually inclined over a sum on a slate; sees Kathleen prance before him in her newest frock. Watches his face when the girl sings just for him.
Swamped in flesh, Materia can’t seem to get a clear deep breath. By June she’s sleeping on the kitchen cot, no more stairs. This baby is sapping the life out of her — no more spot-checks on her husband and daughter, not at this rate.
She hasn’t a thing to fit her any more so she takes three old dresses and cuts them into one: rosebud print in front, green taffeta sides and plaid back. She spends a comfortable day but when James comes home it’s “What in the name of God have you got on?”
She asks him for money. She buys a remaindered bolt of crazy floral calico and, with the help of Mrs Luvovitz, fashions three roomy dresses. Mrs Luvovitz offers her several yards of pale blue muslin instead but Materia declines. She likes the flowers. James shakes his head but doesn’t comment.
Materia’s always murmuring these days, her lips constantly moving whether she’s mending a sock or changing a nappy. Worst, while making her glacial way through town to church.
“Don’t be traipsing up Plummer Avenue nattering to yourself, woman.”
“I not talking to myself.”
“Then who’re you talking to?”
“Mary.”
Jesus Murphy.
Materia sees the demon grinning at her again from the mouth of its furnace. Night and day she secretes and spins a gauzy shroud of prayer in which she swaddles Kathleen. She sees the body of her daughter cocooned, suspended, green eyes open. But no one can spin for ever, and cocoons must yield, whether to release a butterfly or a meal. What has she left to sacrifice? She offered up her music long ago. She would mortify her flesh, but that might harm her unborn child. She has no vanity left to mortify, so she offers up her fat, her shabby shifts, her curly hair gone thin. But the demon isn’t satisfied.
In the cool dark of Mount Carmel Church, Materia looks into the narrow green face of the serpent and makes the sign of the cross. Beside her kneels tiny Mercedes, little white-gloved hands folded around her very own rosary beads. Behind them baby Frances crawls beneath the pews, trailing her dress in the dust, finding shiny things. Materia fixes on the serpent’s red eyes and bargains: if the demon will limit itself to one daughter, Materia will allow it to have Kathleen when the time comes. The demon grins. Agrees.
Then Materia looks up into the serene alabaster face of Our Lady and asks her to slow the demon down. Materia recites the Memorare: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto you, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; to you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen.”
Our Lady will think of something. Merciful are her ways.
The Third Secret of Fatima
“I wonder,” observed Emma, “whether well educated Romanists really believe in all the strange miracles which are said to have been worked by their saints.”
CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E
July is sweltering. They’ve vegetables enough to feed an army. The scarecrow simmers in James’s old pit boots and Materia’s motley dress of rosebuds, taffeta and plaid, the fedora angled on its blank head as always. If you’ve ever stuck your hand inside a haystack and pulled it out again as though from a hot oven, then you know what straw can do. Pete heats up quietly. James waters the garden from the creek. Materia fills jar upon jar with preserves, labelling them “Summer 1914”.
James doesn’t go to the baseball game on August 3, so he misses all the excitement of New Waterford’s victory over Sydney, but he’ll read about it on the front page of the Post next day. James has enough to keep himself busy, what with his job, the garden and his daughter. That’s why he doesn’t go to ball games, or sit down to politics in front of MacIsaac’s store or a deck of cards in back. In this way, he foils the efforts of most of New Waterford never to let him forget that once a scab, always a scab.
James strolls up Plummer Avenue on his way to buy the paper. He no longer takes the cart, for why shouldn’t he walk through this town? He lived here before there even was a town, before there was a coal company or a single miner.
From a block away you might think James was walking on water, but it’s just the shimmer of the cinders. Nothing is stirring this afternoon, certainly not a breeze. Those who have not taken refuge at the shore sit motionless on their front stoops, feet in buckets of ice-water. For once it’s a good day to be underground.
James is dressed, as usual, like a gentleman. Only a beast or an imperfectly civilized man reacts blindly to the vicissitudes of nature. Let the semi-literate masses strip to their undershirts, and behold the crux of their problem right there. So he strolls coolly into town. Cucumber in a woollen suit.
He buys the Post at MacIsaac’s, where a couple of old-timers sit blinking occasionally. MacIsaac is sound asleep behind the cash. James drops his coins on the counter and, glancing at the headline as he leaves the store, can’t suppress a pang of civic pride at his town’s big baseball win. The old fellers watch him go, then break their wilted silence to speculate as to what qualifications might render a man insensible to scorching heat.
At the corner of Seventh Street an old West Indian woman rings a bell, selling oranges from a handcart. Atop her pyramid of fruit is set a sample of her wares split open. Blood-red juices. James buys one.
The sun has begun to set, the cool balm of evening coming on. Lilacs relax and the air is full of blue perfume. A dog barks, resurrected from the heat, and someone has struck up a strathspey on the fiddle, it being still too warm for a reel. James turns onto Water Street in time to see Leo Taylor pull up in front of the house in his buggy. Kathleen is home from her rehearsal. She waits while Tayl
or hops out and lets down the step for her. She descends from the buggy with the ease of a born aristocrat. Taylor says not a word and neither does Kathleen, nor does she look at him. It’s moments like this that James savours. The sun basking in the west, blessing this island with rare rose and amber hues — it’s all of life in a moment like this. God in His Heaven, and I in mine.
Kathleen sees James and runs to him as though she were suddenly seven years old again, breaking one spell to cast another. She’s so excited, so nervous, “I could puke!”
“Some of the best singers puke before every show,” James tells her.
She laughs, delighted and disgusted, frisking him for the treat she knows he’ll have. Got it! — an orange hidden in the newspaper.
She’s been practising for weeks. Tonight she will sing publicly before a paying audience for the first time. Just at the Lyceum in Sydney. Just with amateurs and an audience of locals. But all the same. A performance is a performance.
“Always sing like you’re at the Metropolitan Opera,” says James. “Sing like you’re at La Scala and never forget your public.”
They’re not calling it a debut. But it is a first, in its way. And they’re both beside themselves with nerves.
That night:
THE ORPHEUS SOCIETY OF SYDNEY PRESENTS
ELEGANT SPECIAL SCENERY
WONDERFUL MECHANICAL DEVICES
MYSTERIOUS ELECTRICAL EFFECTS
IN A VERY MERITORIOUS PRODUCTION OF
Great Moments from Grand Opera
Don Juan disappears in a blaze of flashpots, dragged to hell by a statue. Silence. Applause. “Bravo!” “Encore!” “Blow ’er sky high, b’y!” The Lyceum is packed, standing room only. They’ve seen Tosca skewer Scarpia, then immediately leap into a void upstage. Seville has given way to Nagasaki, women have sleepwalked, been entombed in Egypt and brown body paint, stabbed themselves on their wedding day, and gone mad. Just the high points. INTERMISSION. Fans revolve in the vaulted ceiling, where leafy bowers and painted youths droop beside nymph-infested ponds. Below, spectators are happily abuzz as they unstick themselves from wooden seats and head for the lobby, where tea is served with date squares and little Union Jacks.