Which are the sins against hope?
The sins against hope are presumption and despair.
What is despair?
Despair is the loss of hope in God’s mercy.
Mercedes says to herself, “I am damned.”
Her face has eroded to shale, her brown eyes are dry with sorrow. The ocean sorely tempts her like a lover — she longs to shave her body and walk stinging into salt, naked and anonymous, battered and embraced by rage, nothing personal. Drown. The word is melodious. Beckoning.
Standing back from the grave-site, Teresa looks at Mercedes looking at the ocean and starts to pray for her. For the sake of the girl in the ground. Teresa stays and prays until everyone but she and Mercedes have left the grave and night has begun to fall. Finally Mercedes hesitates … then turns away, and walks home instead of into the ocean.
That night, the Virgin Mary tells her what to do.
Sudden Light
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot telclass="underline"
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
Rose is sixty-five. Ancient for a jazzman. Rock ’n’ roll reigns and there are fewer gigs now. She has attained that thankless high status, to wit: Doc Rose is the jazz pianist most often cited by famous jazz pianists as their favourite jazz pianist. Knowledge of Doc Rose is a litmus test of connoisseurship. The records are hard to come by now and cherished by those in the know. The rarefied fan club knows everything about Doc Rose except that he and his manager live hand to mouth on 135th Street.
Lily cleans churches, including the one on the second floor. Rose plays chess and checkers on the corner with the other old men. Lily has never cut her hair. It hangs down to her knees, streaked with grey. There are lightweight aluminum braces available nowadays, but she never thought to buy one when they had the money. Her face is fallen but still sweet, her eyes the same. She is forty-five.
It’s just after eight on Sunday night. They’re watching “The Ed Sullivan Show” on television when the knock comes at the door. Lily opens it and Anthony smiles, embarrassed.
“Hello. Miss Piper?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know me, although we actually have the same name, I knew your sister, Miss Mercedes Piper. My name is Anthony Piper.”
Lily looks at the young man. Rose doesn’t take her eyes off Topo Gigio while growling out the side of her mouth, “Someone cack and leave us money?”
“I, no, I don’t think so, heh.”
“Then go away.”
Eddie, kees me goodnight.
Lily says to him, “Aloysius.”
Anthony says, “I beg your pardon?” convinced now of his mistake, wrong apartment, a senile old couple, ancient smell of cabbage….
Lily says, “Come in.”
He says, “You are Lily Piper?”
“That’s right.”
“In or out, make a decision,” Rose is beginning to enjoy herself.
He steps in. What a day. His first time in New York City. Subway to the black metropolis so strange and familiar, he belongs everywhere and nowhere. Anthony has experienced the feeling before — no matter where he is, there is something about people’s struggles to keep their memories that bruises his heart, because it’s too soft too break. The world is his orphanage. Why he should feel so sorry for the other people on the planet is a mystery to him. He’s actually a very happy person. It’s just that he doesn’t know there’s a difference between love and empathy, nor does he question why he should be overcome so frequently with nostalgia for times and places not his own. He can’t see differences. Only variety. He travels well.
The soft heart feeds a wire frame that is never still. He plays spoons, fiddle, mouth harp, and is learning the bones from a man called Wild Archie — odd, Archie came out of an orphanage too — whom he met at the Cape Breton Club in Halifax. Anthony is wearing desert boots, white jeans, a black turtleneck and an Afro. Slim and eager, a bright penny. Green lights in his hazel eyes.
“You grew up to be happy,” says Lily.
He looks at her more closely, not trusting his sense that he’s met her before, which happens to him so often. As does the reverse. So familiar.
“I guess you must know,” he says carefully, “Miss Piper passed away. Quite recently.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
Lily mourned Frances long ago, on the night she left, but she never imagined Mercedes dying, although she has prayed for her soul every night.
“I’m sorry,” he hands Lily his handkerchief.
“That’s all right … she was my sister….”
“I don’t know what you’re blubbering for,” snarks Rose, “she tried to have you extradited.”
“Exorcized.”
Where am I, thinks Anthony, and who are these people?
Lily blows her nose, “Aloysius, did you know Frances? Did Frances ever get to see you?”
“Actually, my name is Anthony. Um — Frances who?”
“What do you do for a living, Tony?” Rose probing for a percentage.
“I’m a musician —”
“Shit,” shifting back to the TV.
“— and I teach ethnomusicology.”
Rose turns up the volume. Another damn rock ’n’ roll band from England.
Anthony is not giving up. “I should explain that Miss Piper more or less adopted me from afar, if you know what I mean, and when she died she left me her house, and she asked me to —”
“Any money?” Rose’s last attempt.
“No. I think she spent all her money on me. I don’t know why. She was a nice lady.”
“Our Lady of Lourdes,” says Lily.
Our Lady of Loonies, thinks Anthony, instantly contrite, can’t help the things that pop into his head, his love of humanity notwithstanding.
“The cocoa tin,” says Lily.
Cuckoo, thinks Anthony. Then he remembers his errand. He opens his knapsack and takes out a sealed cardboard tube. “When Miss Piper died, she left me a note with your name and address, and instructions for me to give you this personally.”
He hands the tube to Lily. She breaks the seal at one end and withdraws a paper scroll. She spreads it out on the table.
Anthony asks, “What is it?”
“It’s the family tree,” Lily says. “Look. We’re all in it.”
Rose flicks off the TV, scuffs over on her dilapidated slippers, fishes for her glasses.
“See?” Lily tells Anthony. “You have quite a few brothers and sisters. Your father’s still alive, although, oh that’s too bad, your stepmother Adelaide is gone.”
“‘Leo (Ginger) Taylor,’” he reads aloud.
“That’s your father, dear. And your Aunt Teresa too, she’s still living according to this — and look, you have a cousin too. ‘Adele Claire’.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There you are, there.”
Lily points to the issue of Frances Euphrasia and Leo (Ginger). Sprouting from the union of their branches is his name in green ink, “Anthony (Aloysius)”.
Ambrose is there too, twinned with Lily, and under his name the words “died at birth”. Brother and sister hang by a twig from a branch that joins James to Kathleen. Rose looks at Lily. But Lily just folds her hands.