Mercedes is almost six. She never fails to bring Daddy his tea, balancing it carefully along with the evening’s book. She is a good child who takes her role as Mumma’s helper and Frances’s big sister very seriously — although it looks likely she’ll turn out on the plain side, her hair a bit mousy. Nonetheless she has nice brown eyes and a good disposition. But James can’t help being particularly taken with Frances. She’s a live one, going on five, with her burnished gold ringlets and mischievous grin, green lights dancing in her hazel eyes. Always ready with a joke for Daddy: “I’ve got your nose!” And full of good ideas for games that she and Mercedes can play. “Mercedes, let’s shave!” “Mercedes, know what? These buttons can fit in our noses.” Mercedes has learned by trial and error when to say, “Okay,” and when to say, “Let’s pretend.”
James doesn’t like the sound of Materia and the children chattering in Arabic but he doesn’t object. He simply counters with the special time they spend together after supper. He leavens the weight of classics with fairy-tales and rhymes. The girls love poems and learn them easily. Standing at the foot of his chair holding hands, neat as two pins in Kathleen’s old frocks — blue for Mercedes, red for Frances — their button boots so nicely shined, they recite in piping singsong voices: “‘I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.’”
Then Frances squeals with glee and Mercedes curtsies. James smiles and claps. Frances scrambles onto his knee, Mercedes lays her cheek against his hand and James feels the ice in his chest breaking up. The war is finally over. He is home again, and everything is turning out all right after all.
I have you fast in my fortress
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you for ever,
Yes for ever and a day
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin
And moulder in dust away.
There are fewer letters from Kathleen than James would like, but now and then Giles sends a card assuring him that all is well. In June, a package arrives from Kathleen containing twin sailor-boy dolls, one for Frances and one for Mercedes. They are thrilled and immediately take the new additions to meet the rest of their doll family, “Look, children, these are your new American cousins.” There is also a letter and James calls his girls to the wingback chair and reads it aloud.
“‘Dear Daddy and Mumma and young ladies,
I am making wonderful progress under the expert tutelage of my voice teacher. He could not be better pleased, and neither could I. Giles is a wonderful companion and she has introduced me to a number of quite inspiring cultural experiences. To date, I have enjoyed excursions to the Museum of Natural History, as well as theatrical evenings of modern dance. There is also a good deal of modern music being premièred in Manhattan, and it is a privilege to be among the first to hear such ground-breaking compositions. There are also numerous soldiers passing through on their way to the Front, and I plan to assist Giles in wrapping bandages — although I cannot claim any great skill with knitting-needles and would pity the poor soldier who received a pair of socks from me! These diversions aside, my time is almost entirely caught up with lessons and practice, practice, practice. Please say hello to Sister Saint Cecilia if you happen to see her in town. I will write again soon.
Love, Kathleen’”
Content, James folds the letter and tucks it into his breast pocket. Then he tells Frances and Mercedes once again about how, when Kathleen finishes her schooling, they will take the train to New York City and hear her sing at The Metropolitan Opera House. Mercedes pictures a white palace, and Kathleen sitting on a throne next to a handsome prince. Frances sees a castle with mermaids swimming in a moat full of ginger beer, and Kathleen holding a sword, singing on a balcony.
The summer flies past. Materia cooks, James works, the little girls thrive. By fall, they can read. It has happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy’s lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, there comes a day when they no longer have to pretend. The glass of the mirror has simply melted away and now they are free to enter as many worlds as they like, together or alone. Thank you, Daddy.
On November 7, James walks to the post office with his girls to find a letter from New York waiting for him. There is his usual pleasure at the sight of the postmark, but it is followed today by slight surprise, for there is no return address and his own name and address are written in a ladylike but unknown hand. While Frances and Mercedes scrupulously divide a shoestring of licorice, James opens the letter and reads….
Its contents are a cruel contrast to its refined penmanship. It is signed “An Anonymous Well-Wisher”. James folds the letter over and over until it is minute, and considers: either it is a malicious joke. Or it is true. He leaves that night.
Three and a half days later, at 6:05 a.m. on November 11, 1918, he walks out of Grand Central Station.
He finds Kathleen. And takes her home again.
Book 2. NO MAN’S LAND
O Holy Night
On the first night of summer 1919, in the attic of the house on Water Street, as Kathleen lies dying — and unable to appreciate that fact due to the heaving and excessive pain, due to the blood that’s all a result of the bomb jammed in the antechamber of her belly, threatening to explode before it can be dropped to earth — she has a moment’s respite: a calm descends and the pain dissolves and disappears, along with the siren wail of her mother’s incessant prayer warning of an air raid, God is coming, wailing in supplication, Come O Lord, begging God to pass over and to bless, not touch, this house. O Lord hear our prayer. O Lord be with us at a safe distance now and at the hour of our death —
This is a breech birth; the child is stuck feet first. Someone will not get out of this room alive. There was a choice to be made. It has been made. Or at least the choice has been allowed to occur. Everything disappears from sound for Kathleen: her mother’s voice — by now perhaps speaking in tongues or at least the mother tongue — the pounding of her father’s fists on the door — he’ll break it down in a moment. She levitates in a profound and complete relief, peace, floating absence of pain. It’s all over for her now, anyone can see that.
Materia sees it. Has been expecting it, accepts it, unlike James on the other side of the door. She gently closes her daughter’s eyes, then takes a pair of scissors — the old kitchen scissors, freshly sharp and sterilized to cut the cord — and plunges the pointier blade into Kathleen’s abdomen just above the topography of buried head. She makes a horizontal incision and reaches in; there’s not much time, the infant will suffocate in a moment, in a moment James will be through the door, one cut is not enough. Materia sculpts panic into a slow march, reining it in, now and at the hour of our — she makes another cut, a vertical one bisecting the first. She prayer-dives both hands through the centre of the cross-cut into the warm swamp slippery with life, past mysterious ferns and swaying fibres, searching for a handhold on sunken treasure, there an ankle, there an arm, the living treasure caught in a net of fingers. With a series of precise and dire yanks the catch is dragged from where it lay lodged halfway down the canal that locked despite the battering of the seismic tides that were set off by those first gravitational yearnings. The bundle of tiny limbs and vestigial gills and unique fingerprints is hauled towards the torn surface of its small swollen sea. Its four eyes are scorched by the sudden light that jags in through the flapping entrance to the outside world, and in an instant it is borne up and through the wound in Kathleen’s belly.