Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

“Teresa. Read please.”

Mrs Mahmoud has never learned to read English. Teresa reads the letter aloud, then says, “Kathleen Piper. That’s the young lady we heard sing at the Lyceum before the war.”

Mrs Mahmoud nods. “My granddaughter.”

Teresa raises an eyebrow. The girl my little brother ferries to and from school. The princess who has never spoken a single word to him. The one with the voice. Well. “That’s your granddaughter, Mrs Mahmoud?”

Giselle nods.

That night in bed, Giselle skilfully enlightens her husband as to his own intentions. In the morning he writes a cheque. He tells himself that he does it for Giselle. But as he writes the third zero, he reflects upon the future of the family voice. Universally acclaimed. The crowning glory of his success in the New World.

Only Teresa will do for an errand of such importance, and Mahmoud puts the envelope into her hand, saying, “Get a receipt.” Teresa sets out for New Waterford, where she anticipates a rare look at the severed branch of the Mahmoud family tree.

Materia answers the door. She is wearing a smock. She has a pair of stained scissors in her hand. She’s been cutting kidneys for a pie. Little Frances stands peeking out from behind the foliage of her mother’s crazy floral print. Materia’s gaze has widened over the years, as though she sees more of the world at once than other people do. But although she seems to see more, she does not have the expression of someone who is processing what she sees. She doesn’t look, she stares. Now she’s staring up at Teresa.

Teresa recognizes the look of someone who’s not all there. Teresa would have assumed that the big sad woman in the doorway was the hired help had she not been prepared to spot the Mahmoud family resemblance — discernible in the shade and smoothness of the skin, in Mrs Mahmoud’s eyes veiled in a vague face.

“Mrs Piper?”

Materia nods. Teresa enquires politely, “Is Mr Piper home, ma’am?”

Wee Frances has never seen a black person before. Everyone around her is chalk-white except for her own tan mother. She reaches out to Teresa and touches one of her hands. The one holding the envelope. Teresa smiles down at her. Frances collects the moment and puts it in a safe place with two or three others.

Meanwhile, Materia has muttered something and waved her scissors in the general direction of the shed at the side of the house. Teresa heads for the shed and Frances follows her. Materia returns to her kidneys, snip, snap .

Through the crack in the door, Frances sees Teresa hand an envelope to Daddy. Daddy opens the envelope and looks at the contents for quite a while. Then Teresa gets him to write something on a piece of paper that she puts back into her purse. When Teresa comes out of the shed, Frances is lingering nearby.

“What do you want, darlin, hmm? Where’d you get all that pretty yellow hair?”

Frances gazes up by way of an answer. What she wants is everything about this fabulous woman, who is surely a queen from some far-off place. Teresa would laugh if she knew: the Queen of Whitney Pier, dear.

“Here you go, honey.” Teresa hands Frances a piece of rock candy just as —

“Frances!”

The child and the woman look up to see the golden girl step from the taxicab that has pulled up in front of the house. Leo Taylor has an actual automobile now, a Model T Ford with his name stencilled on the side, Leo Taylor Transport. He holds the door open and Kathleen walks past him without a glance. It was she who called out and interrupted the sweet transaction. Now she walks stately towards them and, in cultivated tones, enquires of Teresa, “Can I help you, miss?”

To heck with you, thinks Teresa, “No, Miss Piper, I just dropped something off for your father.”

“Hey, Trese, come on, girl!”

Leo Taylor doesn’t like to linger here. Teresa shakes her head as she climbs into her brother’s cab. The Pipers — living like hillbillies, acting like royalty. They drive away.

“Show me your hand, Frances.”

Frances opens her little hand and reveals the black and white licorice peppermint. A prize. Kathleen takes the sweet and throws it in a high arc across the yard till it lands in the creek with a small plop.

“You know you shouldn’t take candy from strangers, Frances. Especially coloured strangers.”

Girl as she was, Claudia looked upon the world before her like some young untried knight .

CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E.

Kathleen is truly and utterly and completely Kathleen in New York. That’s what the city does for you if it’s meant for you. She’s got plenty of personality and no history, and she has never breathed so much air in her life. She comes from an Atlantic island surrounded by nothing but sea air, yet in the man-made outdoor corridors of this fantastic city she can finally breathe. This air is what the gods live upon. The gods who get things done. Not the gods who mope on ancient promontories and exhale fossil vapours, waiting for someone to fill in the fragments of forgotten sagas that have come unravelled with age. Those gods have sagged so long on their rocks, they are well on the way to turning to stone themselves.

But the new gods. That bright baritone chorus. They inhabit every steel support, every suspension bridge, every gleaming silver train, all things vertical and horizontal, all glass, gravel and sand. They take big breaths and they make big sounds and with every breath and sound they open up more sky.

When Kathleen steps onto Pier 54, she starts writing the book of her life in her head: And then she arrived in the New World. She heard the heels of her sensible shoes ring out on the gangplank, and resolved never to be sensible .

There are a bewildering number of uniformed porters and un-uniformed scamps ready to seize her trunk and make off with it, but Kathleen hauls it to the centre of the terminal and sits on it beneath the big clock, an eye out for her distant cousin, not minding the wait, serenaded by the crowds. It’s clear: the whole world comes to New York City.

Kathleen intends to be the Eleonora Duse of the operatic stage. If anyone can do this, she can: a classically trained girl with modern ideas about holding the mirror up to nature. The born performer’s zeal to leave no heart intact. An engine in her stoked so high it turned her hair red in the womb. Her mixed Celtic-Arab blood and her origins on a scraggly island off the east coast of a country popularly supposed to consist of a polar ice-cap are enough, by American standards, both to cloak her in sufficient diva mystery and to temper the exotic with a dash of windswept North American charm. She’ll refer to pickled moose meat and kippered cod tongues and occasionally swear in Arabic just to get the legend rolling, but she is of the New World, the golden West. She is no Sicilian or Castilian castaway bound for glory, then early ruin. Like them she is going to be great but, unlike them, she is going to survive. She has decided never to stop singing. She will be singing at seventy-five.

She eats a frankfurter in a bun she bought from a fat man with a black moustache who told her the story of his life in broken English. Her life has finally started.

“Kathleen?” Kathleen turns and sees a little spinster lady.

“I’m Giles. Welcome to New York City, dear.”

Giles, to whom Kathleen has been entrusted, has unfaded blue eyes and a genteel apartment in Greenwich Village. Kathleen estimates Giles’s age to be in the vicinity of a hundred and two. In fact Giles is a young sixty. Perhaps, Kathleen speculates, Giles was once a schoolteacher or — better — perhaps Giles is a beneficiary of that vague yet respectable means of support known among English literary heroines as “an annuity”.