Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

Our Lady will think of something. Merciful are her ways.

“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 Taylor 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.

James stays put, his face shiny with impatience and anxiety, his stomach half turned by the past hour of grotesque huffing and straining on the tiny stage. Sister Saint Cecilia places a hand on his sleeve, but he doesn’t notice. She rises and rustles off for a cuppa, thinking it’s too bad and even a little odd that the girl’s mother can’t be here tonight — she had looked forward to meeting Mrs Piper at last, and congratulating her on such a talented daughter. James is feeling badly in need of air but he’s frozen in his seat. He has no wish to mingle and hear the effusions of the benighted throng. Kathleen is on after the intermission.

Unseen by James, a dark little round woman with a grey bun slips into the back of the hall with a tall young black woman. Mrs Mahmoud is here because Benny made a delivery this morning. All these years, she has been able to resist waiting outside Holy Angels to get a look at Kathleen. She has managed never to send a note or a word via Benny to her daughter. But Mrs Mahmoud has come here tonight because she needs to hear her granddaughter sing. And Teresa, her maid, was happy to accompany her, enjoying as she does, refined entertainment.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats for the second act.” The audience rhubarbs back in — the upper crust of Sydney plus quite a few music lovers. The Sydney Symphonette tunes up. The house lights come down. The stage manager puts a taper to the footlights. The curtain rises. A courtyard. A midnight moon. A fountain. Ivy and climbing roses. A cardboard cat with eyes that open and shut, and one working paw — James is irritated, we’re here for the music, not cheap theatrics. A man with a hump and a jester’s hat of bells limps importantly onto the stage. The blood recedes from James’s hands as he waits, every sinew in his body rapt and wrought like the strings on the first violin.

The orchestra sees her first. Then she appears from behind the painted jet of water. Incandescent. Kathleen. In a flowing white gown, her undone hair a halo of fire. James sits forward slightly — stop, stop, stop everyone and just look. Before you listen. You up there in the jingling hat, be still.

Rigoletto cries, “Figlia!” She flies into his arms; “Mio padre!” Father and daughter embrace. They weep, pledge their love, she asks what his real name is — “I am your father, let that suffice.”