James was making many times what he’d made teaching piano. For the first few weeks he wept silently at the beginning of every shift, until his body got rebroken to the work. Every night at home, after he’d turned white again, he’d get on his knees, fold his hands and beg his mother’s forgiveness for going underground.
The Price of a Song
“You’ve got a bit thinner. That’s good,” James said to Materia over supper.
She shrugged.
“What are you day-dreaming about?” James used the term loosely, she was always gawping at everything and nothing.
“Houdini,” she said.
“Who?”
“Houdini.”
He didn’t bother to pursue it. Ask a silly question. He’d long ago given up on conversation and now merely thanked God that the idiocy and swarthiness had bypassed his daughter. And that his wife had learned to cook.
“What’s this?”
“Kibbeh nayeh.”
“This a Hebrew delicacy?”
“Lebanese.”
Benny had smuggled her the recipe.
Anyone can make kibbeh nayeh, anyone can make anything by following directions, but to make it right … that takes a blessed finger. Some say it’s in the length of the cook’s fingers, others claim it’s in the scent, as unique as a fingerprint, that every person carries. It is definitely a gift.
Kibbeh was the national dish of Syria and Lebanon, it had to be made from the most trustworthy meat, therefore the Mahmouds bought only from Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian Butcher Shop. While Mrs Luvovitz and the boys minded the shop, Benny made his deliveries in Sydney, always going last to the Mahmoud house on the hill. There, a dark little round woman with a greying bun of black hair would open the kitchen door to him. Benny didn’t speak Gaelic and Mrs Mahmoud’s English was still halting, but they managed to chat. Benny would go along with the pretence that Mrs Mahmoud’s interest in the Piper family was purely casual.
“Oh sure I know the Pipers, she’s a nice lady Mrs Piper, Lebanese too, I guess you must know her — no? — ah well, yes they’ve got a lovely daughter, Kathleen, goes to Holy Angels, sings like a bird.”
And this morning, when Benny asked Mrs Mahmoud for the kibbeh recipe “for my wife,” she didn’t raise an eyebrow but went immediately to her cupboards and pointed out ingredients. Benny noted it all on brown butcher paper as Mrs Mahmoud mimed the whole process, including the imprinting of a cross on the prepared meat. Benny laughed and shook his head and drew a Star of David for her instead.
Mrs Mahmoud shrugged and said, “What you like,” and gave him the ritual first taste of the imaginary kibbeh.
“Delicious,” he said.
That evening, Mrs Mahmoud watched her husband eat and thought of her lost daughter, perhaps even now serving the same dish to her own husband. Would he appreciate it? Did he love her still?
Nine miles away, James took a forkful of kibbeh and ate.
“It’s delicious.”
“Eat with bread.”
He followed Materia’s example, drizzling oil over the spiced meat and soft cracked wheat, tearing off bits of flat bread, folding the meat into mouthfuls.
“Where’d you learn to cook this?”
“Is raw, no cook.”
He paused.
“Kosher?”
She nodded. He resumed eating. Materia got a pang; she thought, “We’re happy without the girl.”
She touched the back of his neck lightly.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Nothing,” and she returned to the sink.
Up till now the vaudevillians had been white, doing their minstrel shows and piccaninny turns in blackface, but now that there was a coloured migration to the Sydney coalfield, genuine coloured artists started coming up from the States. Materia couldn’t figure out why they too performed under cork with giant painted-on mouths, but she did know she preferred them. She acquired a big collection of ragtime, two-step, cakewalk, processionals, sorrow songs, plantation lullabies and gospel.
She got to play for the Blackville Society Tap Twizzlers when their own accompanist was arrested in Glace Bay. They were a trio of brothers managed by their mother. The eldest had named his feet. He called the left one Alpha and the right one Omega.
Percussive shoes, flashing feet that chatted, clattered, took flight and girdled the globe without ever leaving centre stage at the Empire Theatre. Materia just watched their feet and let her hands go, chunks of Rigoletto colliding with “Coal Black Rose,” “Una Voce Poco Fa” on a see-saw with “Jimmy Crack Corn,” all slapped up against her own spontaneous compositions — just as for the moving pictures, only with the dancers there was a two-way feed. They hounded, flattered, talked back and twisted — ebony, ivory, and nickel clickers grappling till there wasn’t even any melody, just rhythm and attitude.
Materia became a bit of a celebrity, especially among the young folk.
“Hey there Materia, how’s she going, girl?”
“That’s Mrs Piper to you, buddy,” James shot back.
It was a Sunday in March, they were out whitewashing the house. He turned to Materia when the feller had slunk by. “How do you know him?”
“The show.”
The Blackville Society Tap Twizzlers invited her to tour with them as their permanent accompanist. They were going to Europe. Materia said no. She cried on the way home at the thought of how happy she and James could be, seeing the world together with a travelling show. But she knew better than to ask him.
The coloured artists stopped coming soon after, because word had gone down the line that the new arrivals in the Sydney coalfield were up from the West Indies and weren’t too interested in American coloured entertainment. But Materia still had the vaudeville and the picture shows and she was happy as long as she could play. Down in the orchestra pit she consoled herself with the occasional embellishment. Now and then a locomotive sped towards the audience through “I Love You Truly,” and ran over them to “Moonlight Sonata”. Villains struggled with virgins to “The Wedding March” and tenors saved the day to “Turkey in the Straw”. Performers complained, but the audience ate it up when rabbits emerged from top hats to discordant splats and women were sawn in half to “Nearer My God to Thee”. Materia had always smiled as she played but now she started chuckling, though she wasn’t aware of it. This further endeared her to the audience, who liked her all the better for being a bit loony.
These days, James went all the way to Sydney for provisions. With the exception of Benny and Mr MacIsaac, he didn’t darken the door of any Boom Town establishment. Why go in to be insulted when he was paying good money? The whole town was suffering as a result of the strike, not just the miners, so everyone loved to hate a scab. He never walked, he drove his cart so as not to give people the satisfaction of crossing the street when they saw him coming. “And all because I have the gumption to support my family.” It was galling, therefore, on the rare occasion when Materia accompanied him, to hear time and again, “Hello there Materia, how’s the show business, dear?” The same people who wouldn’t give him the time of day would stop to chat with his illiterate wife about her career as a player-piano. Naturally these people would appreciate a low type of music. And why were they out spending money they supposedly didn’t have on the price of admission at the Empire Theatre? There were too many Irish in this town by now for James’s liking. Every second house a shebeen, drunken Catholics the lot. If they worked more and fiddled less they wouldn’t be in such a mess. James thought of Aesop’s grasshopper and ant and made a mental note to enclose the fable in his next letter to Kathleen.