Mercedes covers her face with her arm and allows her heart to open up along its oldest wound. Where will my baby Frances go? She will disappear. She will die and I’ll have no one to love and look after. Little Frances will become a forlorn ghost child, crying on the stairs at night, cold and transparent, with her fuzzy golden braids and her brave stare, “It doesn’t hurt.” And I won’t be able to comfort her.
Mercedes cries until she is dry and empty once more. Then she rises and sits on the edge of her bed. Downstairs they’re singing “O Holy Night”. She reaches into the drawer of her night-table, finds a fresh hanky and blows her nose. She rebraids her hair in the dark. There. Don’t whine. Fix it.
January gales freeze the ocean waves mid-crest, pine trees tinkle in their glass dresses, and it’s warm inside.
“‘Hitler Appointed Chancellor.’”
Lily is scanning the headlines for James.
“There’s going to be another war,” he says. And adds another book to his wall.
Frances bellies up to the piano and plays “My Wild Irish Rose”.
“Sing, Lily,” says James, dropping into the wingback chair.
Upstairs, Mercedes studies by correspondence with Saint Francis Xavier University. Upgrading her earning power.
February will never end, but never mind.
Lily holds the newspaper at the proper distance from James’s new glasses so he can make out the photograph: Chancellor Hitler and His Holiness Pope Pius XI. Shaking hands.
“Yup,” says James. “You watch.”
And he drops off suddenly to sleep the way he does now.
March comes in like a lion.
“‘Franklin D. Roosevelt Elected President.’ Do you want to see the picture, Daddy?” Together they look at the photograph of the tall bespectacled man standing on a hustings swagged in the Stars and Stripes, waving. “‘Pledges to Put America Back on Its Feet.’”
April Fool’s Day. The morning sun floods through the attic window.
“Diphtheria Rose,” says Frances.
Lily hands her the tattered, still pretty doll. Frances holds Dippy Rose over the open hope chest, and recites: “‘Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust.’”
Frances lays her next to Spanish Influenza, Typhoid and TB Ahoy, Small Pox, Scarlet Fever and Maurice. Trixie and Lily look on reverently. On the floor next to the open hope chest, the baptismal gown is laid out.
“Music please, Lily.”
Lily winds up The Old-Fashioned Girl and sets her down to turn on the floor, her head balanced prettily on her hand. She tinkles, “‘Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in lo-o-ve wi-ith you-ou…. ’” Trixie follows the figurine with her eyes, ready to pounce should it stray from its circumference.
Frances picks up the baptismal gown and lays it gently over her dolls. “Next time I open this box, it will be to dress my baby in this gown.”
“And to get your dolls again.”
“No.”
Frances moves to lower the lid but Lily stops her halfway.
“You forgot this, Frances.”
“That’s yours, Lily.”
The photograph of Kathleen. The one that Mercedes kept in Jane Eyre until Lily tore the book apart, it seems so long ago. Lily contemplates it for a moment. Mumma is in the background, in the window.
“What’s that in Mumma’s hand?” Lily asks.
“Scissors.”
“She’s waving.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes still on the photograph, Lily sucks in her upper and lower lips by slow turns, releasing them gently through her teeth.
“This picture belongs to Mercedes,” she says, finally.
“No it doesn’t.”
“I don’t want it.” Lily looks away.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
Lily doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t look up.
“She’s your mother, Lily.”
The Old-Fashioned Girl has stopped turning but Trixie keeps watch just in case. Frances continues gently, “She died. It wasn’t your fault.”
Lily sits very still and listens, veiled by her hair which she has been wearing loose of late, it sweeps to the floor around her like a curtain of fire.
“She went to New York,” says Frances. “She was an opera singer. Something happened there. Daddy brought her home. She lay in this room and never said a word. Ambrose drowned in the creek. It was an accident. You didn’t drown, you got polio instead. I was there.”
The more Frances tells, the more she remembers. As though it were all parked, waiting behind the flimsiest of stage scenery — a scrim perhaps — and suddenly exposed by a trick of light; the countryside dissolving to reveal the battlefield, present all along.
“The night you were born. I don’t know why I brought you to the creek. I loved you. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you. I carried you into the water. I held you and I prayed.” Frances strokes her belly, feeling for a kick inside, but it’s all quiet.
“Did you baptize Ambrose too?”
“Yes.”
They sit for a long moment together, not talking, breathing in the soft cedar cloud.
Frances puts The Old-Fashioned Girl back in the hope chest, then turns and looks at Lily, who is growing up.
“Lily. If you want to ask me something, I’ll tell you the truth.”
Lily has dropped the photograph of the laughing girl. She looks up.
“Ambrose loves you, Frances.”
Frances takes Lily’s hand and places it against her belly. “Here. You can feel him. He’s awake now.”
Lily feels the ripple. She presses her ear against the site.
“What do you hear, Lily?”
“The ocean.”
The car horn blasts outside; Mercedes has learned to drive. Frances and Lily go to the window and wave down. Daddy is standing by the car, leaning on his cane, he smiles up. Lily turns away from the window, intending to close the hope chest before going downstairs, but she sees that Frances has already done so. She pauses at the top of the stairs and says, “Are you coming Frances?” Frances turns and goes directly to join her sister at the top of the stairs. No need to close the hope chest, for she sees that Lily has done so already.
It’s a lovely day for the drive to Mabou. Frances would rather have had her baby here at home with Mrs Luvovitz, but she relented because it seemed to mean so much to Mercedes — “They’re equipped for emergencies, Frances, it’s safer even than going into hospital, please dear, if only for my sake.”
James stands holding the passenger door open. Mercedes pulls on a pair of kid gloves as Frances climbs in beside her.
“Frances, I have to tell you a secret.”
“What?”
“I’m pregnant too.”
Mercedes’ smile trembles for a moment, then she bursts out in a high-pitched giggle, “April Fool!”