Fall on Your Knees (18 page)

Its contents are a cruel contrast to its refined penmanship. It is signed “An Anonymous Well-Wisher”. James folds the letter over and over until it is minute, and considers: either it is a malicious joke. Or it is true. He leaves that night.

Three and a half days later, at 6:05 a.m. on November 11, 1918, he walks out of Grand Central Station.

He finds Kathleen. And takes her home again.

Book 2

N
O
M
AN’S
L
AND

O Holy Night

On the first night of summer 1919, in the attic of the house on Water Street, as Kathleen lies dying — and unable to appreciate that fact due to the heaving and excessive pain, due to the blood that’s all a result of the bomb jammed in the antechamber of her belly, threatening to explode before it can be dropped to earth — she has a moment’s respite: a calm descends and the pain dissolves and disappears, along with the siren wail of her mother’s incessant prayer warning of an air raid,
God is coming
, wailing in supplication,
Come O Lord
, begging God to pass over and to bless, not touch, this house. O Lord hear our prayer. O Lord be with us at a safe distance now and at the hour of our death —

This is a breech birth; the child is stuck feet first. Someone will not get out of this room alive. There was a choice to be made. It has been made. Or at least the choice has been allowed to occur. Everything disappears from sound for Kathleen: her mother’s voice — by now perhaps speaking in tongues or at least the mother tongue — the pounding of her father’s fists on the door — he’ll break it down in a moment. She levitates in a profound and complete relief, peace, floating absence of pain. It’s all over for her now, anyone can see that.

Materia sees it. Has been expecting it, accepts it, unlike James on the other side of the door. She gently closes her daughter’s eyes, then takes a pair of scissors — the old kitchen scissors, freshly sharp and sterilized to cut the cord — and plunges the pointier blade into Kathleen’s abdomen just above the topography of buried head. She makes a horizontal incision and reaches in; there’s not much time, the infant will suffocate in a moment, in a moment James will be through the door, one cut is not enough. Materia sculpts panic into a slow march, reining it in,
now and at the hour of our
— she makes another cut, a vertical one bisecting the first. She prayer-dives both hands through the centre of the cross-cut into the warm swamp slippery with life, past mysterious ferns and swaying fibres, searching for a handhold on sunken treasure, there an ankle, there an arm, the living treasure caught in a net of fingers. With a series of precise and dire yanks the catch is dragged from where it lay lodged halfway down the canal that locked despite the battering of the seismic tides that were set off by those first gravitational yearnings. The bundle of tiny limbs and vestigial gills and unique fingerprints is hauled towards the torn surface of its small swollen sea. Its four eyes are scorched by the sudden light that jags in through the flapping entrance to the outside world, and in an instant it is borne up and through the wound in Kathleen’s belly.

The air splashes and spumes against it, threatening to drown it —
them
— for there are two but they have yet to be cut in half, they are still one creature, really, male and female segments joined at the belly by a common root system. It-they is a blood breather and could drown in this fatal spray of oxygen, will drown if they remain silent much longer, will become bright blue fishes in a moment. But the cords are cut,
snip-snap
, and tied just in time, and in an instant the shocking air is gulped and strafed into the lungs. They become babies just in time; slick, bloody, new, wailing, squinting, furious, two.

One of them, the male child, bleeds a little from a cut on his ankle. His feet were nestled next to his sister’s head when the scissors descended. He was all set to arrive head first like a good mammal. Technically, therefore, the female twin is responsible for the death of the mother, for it is she who was breech. But this was pure roulette. The pair had been revolving counter-clockwise in the chamber for weeks before their birth was triggered.

Kathleen is an abandoned mine. A bootleg mine, plundered, flooded; a ruined and dangerous shaft, stripped of fuel, of coal, of fossil ferns and sea anemones and bones, of creatures half plant, half animal, and any chance that any of it might end up a diamond.

James has supposedly seen worse. He was in the war after all. Now he finally sees something from which he will not recover. Beyond shell-shock. Beyond No Man’s Land.

In a cavern in a canyon,
excavating for a mine,
dwelt a miner, forty-niner,
and his daughter Clementine.
Light she was and like a fairy,
and her shoes were number nine,
herring boxes without topses,
shoes they were for Clementine.
Oh m’darlin, oh m’darlin, oh m’darlin Clementine;
you are lost and gone forever,
dreadful sorry, Clementine.

Here’s what Kathleen saw just before the moment of respite. Between agony and release, she saw — framed by the door which is thumping like a heart attack — Pete. With his head off
Hello little girl
. This time he’s not behind her in the mirror. He is out in the open. It’s safe for him now. And after all, he just wants to get a look at her, just one good look
Hello there
. His no face tucked beneath his
arm Hello
.

And when he has looked his fill, he politely nods his stump of neck and leaves. She whimpers briefly. There is the blissful release from pain. Nothing has ever been better than this moment. It is enough. And then all we can do is see her through her mother’s eyes, because her own are extinguished.

Materia’s dilemma was this: Do I let the mother live by removing the infants limb by limb, finally crushing the heads to allow for complete expulsion from the mother’s body? It is hard to imagine a worse sin for a Catholic. The sin resides not in the gory details of the operation, because the details of doing the right thing are equally gory. The sin resides in preferring the life of the mother to those of the children. For this you are eternally damned. Materia does the right thing by allowing the mother to die and the children to live.

So why does Materia die a few days later of a guilty conscience? Because she did the right thing for the wrong reason. For a reason which was itself a mortal sin. For two days she wrestles with her conscience. But God is everywhere. It takes Materia forty-eight hours to face that what she did, although correct in the eyes of the Church, was murder in His all-seeing eyes: the real reason I let my daughter die is because I knew she was better off that way. I didn’t know her well, but I knew she didn’t want to live any more. She preferred to die and I allowed her to do so.

Looked at from this angle, Materia has not saved two babies, she has mercy-killed one young woman, and therein lies the mortal sin. For Materia cannot swear that, had her daughter been clamouring for life, she might not have used the scissors to dismember the infants rather than open the sky for them. In her heart of hearts she suspects this might have been so. And in this suspicion Materia discovers the chill comfort that, in the end, she managed to love her daughter after all.

God sees an opening and rushes in. He makes himself comfortable in the back of Materia’s mind for a couple of days, during which time she cleans obsessively.

On the third day she cleans the oven, first turning on the gas to soften up the grit inside, it’ll only take a moment. She is so tired. She hasn’t slept in three nights, not so much as a tiny zizz, and she has never worked harder. She kneels in front of the oven, peering in, waiting for the gas to do its work, her arms folded on the rack. It’ll only take a moment — she rests her head upon her arms. She is so tired. She will start scrubbing in just a moment, just one more moment….

For the umpteenth time that week James has to improvise a criminal mind, for he doesn’t naturally have one. He turns off the gas, hauls his late wife upstairs and onto their bed, scrunches her rosary into her hands, then calls the doctor and the priest. This allows Materia to be buried next to Kathleen in the churchyard instead of in an unsanctified field somewhere — in the type of place where soldiers and suicides and unbaptized babies sit out eternity, some unholy No Man’s Land.

The Mass Card

May Jesus have mercy on the Soul of

Mrs James (Materia) Piper (née Mahmoud)
Died June 23, 1919
Age 33

“We have loved her in life. Let us not abandon her, until we have conducted her by our prayers into the house of the Lord.” ST. AMBROSE

Solace Art. Co. - 202 E. 44th St. N.Y.

Frances is going on six now. She has a number of questions regarding the mass card, but this is clearly not the time or place to raise them. Mercedes kneels next to her, crying and crying into her little white gloves, her hanky already drenched. Daddy’s face is frozen. If the wind changes it will stay that way for ever. Mrs Luvovitz, in a pew across the aisle, is crying behind her black veil. This is the first time Mrs Luvovitz has ever been inside a church. Mrs MacIsaac is there too, with dusty grapes on her hat. Frances decides the wind must have changed for her long ago. Filling in for Materia at the organ is Sister Saint Cecilia. Or at least it must be she within the flowing black robe beneath the Gothic skyline of starched white wimple. Frances thinks it logical that nuns wear cathedrals on their heads.

At the back of the church there is a phalanx of strangers. People with black curly hair, full features and smooth olive faces. These are some of Frances’s unknown relatives. Frances’s unknown Grandfather Mahmoud is not present. For him this funeral is redundant. Right now he’s locked in the back of his store, hunched on a plain wooden chair, apparently poring over a ledger.

Mr Benny-the-Butcher Luvovitz, Daddy and Mr MacIsaac are the pall-bearers. It’s all very much like Kathleen’s funeral a few days ago except for three things: Mumma was sitting at the church organ that day instead of lying in the box. And the scary old man who peered into Kathleen’s casket and muttered bad words in Mumma’s language, he’s not here. But most important, Frances has noticed at the very back, standing next to the dark little round woman with the grey bun, one tall lean figure: the dark lady who came with an envelope for Daddy and a candy for Frances a whole year and a bit ago. Teresa is here for some reason. Teresa the maid. Queen Teresa. Frances doesn’t listen when told to keep her eyes front, and has to be yanked around by Daddy, who will reserve proper punishment for home later on. If she hurries, perhaps Frances will be able to make it out of the church in time to run after the lady and hop into the taxi with her, never to return. They will drive off together into the land of black and white licorice peppermint rock candy.

“Eyes front!”

Frances is really going to get it after the funeral. She dares not sneak another look behind her at the woman of her dreams. So she concentrates on the mass card instead:
ST AMBROSE
. The name detaches itself from the card, leaving its holy prefix behind like a tail, and floats up into her mind, where it wafts about gently until it settles via some mysterious associative route upon the infant boy who died a few nights ago in her arms. Ambrose. Yes. That will be his name. Ambrose.

There have been three deaths in the space of one week at 191 Water Street. And two funerals. And three baptisms. And three burials. And two mass cards, identical, fill in the blanks. What a week. Enough to make you feel as though you’ve breathed laughing gas. And right now Frances wants very badly to laugh, she can’t tell why, except that it’s the single worst thing a person could do right about now. Oh no. Now that she has thought of laughing she can’t unthink it. She covers her face with her hands and grins. She tries to grin out the laughter. To exhale it silently, smoothly. But she starts to convulse and shake. She clamps her hands tighter against her face and gives in. She can no longer resist. It’s like the tide of pee when you’re outside playing and refuse to go inside and use the toilet — your water breaks and it’s both a blessed relief and the ultimate mortification.