Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

On days like this, Prohibition seems doubly ludicrous. By evening, kitchens will overflow with music and family and conversation. Jugs and cups of tea will be passed around. Mounties will turn a blind eye to hotel bars and speakeasies and more than one brawl will add to the evening’s entertainment.

James will not work tonight. And he certainly will not socialize, although this is the one night when bridges might be mended — he is a veteran, after all, and decorated. But this is also one of two nights in the year when he does not trust himself near a bottle, because he wishes to forget, not remember, the day the Armistice was signed. All over town, people are asking each other the ritual question “Do you remember where you were the day the war ended, b’y?” James remembers all too well. He was in New York City. He was in Giles’s apartment in Greenwich Village. He was walking through the front door because it was unlocked. He had called out but no one answered. He is walking down the hallway, the apartment smells like lavender, he is looking for Kathleen, he finds her — stop

Tonight James needs to be safe at home in the bosom of his family.

Frances is already home playing piano, imagining her future life as a white slave cabaret dancer in Cairo, playing Mumma’s forbidden music from the hope chest — Daddy says it’s coloured music, put it away. She is bobbing on the bench to “Coal Black Rose” when James and Mercedes rush in with Lily. Daddy carries Lily upstairs and Mercedes follows. Frances leaves the piano and takes the steps two at a time to the bathroom, where Daddy unrolls the stocking that’s stuck to Lily’s tiny foot and Mercedes gets the carbolic acid. Lily doesn’t cry out at the pain, she just looks over Mercedes’ shoulder at Frances in the doorway. Frances says, “It’s okay, little gingerbread boy,” which is one of their special codes, adding, “Hayola kellu bas Helm.” Lily’s gaze does not waver as she replies, “Inshallah.” James glances at Frances in the doorway but says nothing. Mercedes bandages Lily’s foot, praying that there won’t be a scene later.

Inshallah is Lily’s magic word. It is from the language that she knows ought not to be used by day except in an emergency. Because the words are like wishes from a genie — don’t waste them. Lily has not even a rudimentary understanding of Arabic; it is, rather, dreamlike. At night in bed, long after lights-out, she and Frances speak the strange language. Their bed language. Frances uses half-remembered phrases and tells fragments of old stories, weaving them with pieces of songs, filling in the many gaps with her own made-up words that approximate the sounds of Mumma’s Old Country tongue. Lily converses fluently in the made-up language, unaware which words are authentic, which invented, which hybrid. The meaning resides in the music and the privacy of their magic carpet bed. Arabian Nights.

Later that evening, when Mercedes has gone into the kitchen to make cocoa for everyone, Lily slips off Daddy’s lap in the wingback chair without waking him and quietly asks Frances to redo her bandage: Mercedes has wrapped it a little too tightly.

Frances has grown an inch and a half. She is now five feet tall and old enough to quit school. And she would, except that Daddy will not hear of it. Frances wants to get out in the world and garner some practical experience so she can join the French Foreign Legion as a nurse. She wants to cross the desert disguised as a camel driver by day and a seductress by night, smuggling secret documents to the Allies. Mata Hari and her seven veils. Except that Frances would escape the firing squad at the last second. But Daddy only ever has one response regardless of the extravagance of Frances’s ambitions: “Even spies — especially spies — need an education.”

Frances has already shamed Mercedes by flunking two grades. Not that it makes much difference, seeing’s how they were both put ahead a year when they started, owing to the fact that they could already read and do long division. So by Frances’s calculations she has really only flunked one grade.

Frances always sat at the back of the class with the hulking boys until the teacher realized it was best to move her up front. She has become pretty tight with the Corneliuses. Cornelius the younger has turned out nice, his friends call him Puss-Eye. Everyone expects him to be a priest because no one can imagine him as a miner or a soldier. Cornelius the older is nasty, his nickname is Petal. Frances saw Petal’s thing three years ago but she has never shown him hers. From Petal, Frances extorted forbidden information and cigarettes in exchange for false hope. Petal always thought Frances was going to let him demonstrate his lessons one of these days, but Frances would just tell him, “You’re nothing but a brute. Piss off.” Petal quit school last year and moved to Vermont to cut wood and terrorize Americans, so aside from Puss-Eye and Mercedes, who don’t count, Frances is without a worthy ally at Mount Carmel. Unless you can call Sister Saint Eustace Martyr an ally.

She is the principal and therefore Frances’s arch-enemy. Not because she has threatened to expel Frances, but because she refuses to. And how else is Frances going to get out of school? Frances has done many bad things to this end. None of them, however, seems to have been quite bad enough for Sister Saint Eustace, a woman whose faith — judging by her belief in Frances — could move mountains.

“You have God-given ability, Frances. When are you going to apply yourself?”

Silence. Smell of beeswax. Frances fidgets.

Sister persists. “There are scholarships available for bright students, but you’ll have to buckle down and start achieving consistently.”

“Yes, Sister Saint Useless, thank you.”

Frances thinks Sister Saint Eustace does not notice.

Or: “Why do you do these things, Frances?” This could refer to anything from theft or defacement of other people’s property, to reducing a fellow pupil to tears by telling her that her parents have just been killed in an automobile accident, “Your mother’s head came right off.”

“Why, Frances? When we know that deep down you’re a good girl.”

“I’m sorry, sister. I’ll try to behave in a way that’s worthy of all the special efforts you make on my behalf.”

“What about what’s worthy of you, Frances?”

Silence. Frances glances up at poor disappointed Jesus on the cross. She glances down at her nicotine fingers.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Frances?”

“A cabaret parasite.”

Sister’s expression does not change. Frances grows beet-red under the beady blue gaze. Finally: “You know, Frances, sometimes it’s the wildest girls who end up with the strongest vocations.”

No way, no way I’m being a nun.

“But you don’t have to become a nun to get a good education and pursue a satisfying career. Women can do anything nowadays. You’re an intelligent girl, Frances. The world is your oyster.”

Yeah, slimy and smelly.

Frances wonders, what will it take to get free? Because all Sister Saint Eustace does is poke at an old and tender bruise that reminds Frances what a bad apple she really is.

Frances has been going stir-crazy waiting for her life to begin. She has cut the sleeves off most of her dresses and shortened them herself — uneven is all the rage. She has decided she has a perfect figure, which is none. She removes the ribbons from her braids and ties them around her forehead and she has experimented with the bejewelled-brow look, courtesy of Mercedes’ opal rosary. In the toe of an odd stocking in her drawer she keeps a tube of Rose of Araby lipstick she swiped from MacIsaac’s. She has scorched her hair in an effort to straighten it, and always before her mind’s eye is Louise Brooks, with her jet-black shingle and fringe.