Frances drops the second baby. Oh no. Quick! Hen, rooster, chicken —
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
Frances’s head jerks up, arresting her plunge. It’s Daddy. There’s the great upside-down V of his legs towering at the top of the creek embankment. He’s got the girl baby in one arm.
“Get the hell out of there!”
He’s drunk, otherwise he would never curse in the presence of a child. He reaches down and gets Frances by one arm, easily swinging her up out of the water, her soaked nightgown hanging down past her toes, she could be the Little Mermaid invited at long last onto the good ship Homo Sapiens, ready to try out her new feet. Except for the bloodstains.
The water is dark. James doesn’t see the child on the creek bed. “No!” Frances screams as he sets her down on the grass. She can’t find the words. She can’t tell him, telling is not an option, this is like a dream, she’s forgotten how to say in waking English, “The other baby is in there, he’s going to drown, we have to get him out!” James tosses her ahead, herding her in jerks back towards the house. Frances breaks and runs back. He lurches after her. She reaches the edge of the creek and leaps. Over the top. Splash and plunge. She scrabbles about on the bottom for the baby, her lungs are stinging, in this water she’s as blind as the newborn she can’t find, she finds him. She breaks the surface for the second time as James arrives back, swaying a little, at the creek’s edge. She bundles the baby to her chest; it stirs once and is silent. She stares up at her father and the girl baby. She starts to shiver.
James either says or thinks, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.” He slides down the bank, takes the child and goes through the motions of resuscitation. But it’s no use. The boy baby was in the water a good twenty seconds too long. Frances’s teeth start to chatter, and she wonders if her black and white candy is still at the bottom of the creek or if it has been washed out to sea.
Blancmange
Frances spends the next day in bed, shivering. Her teeth are chattering. She can’t get warm. Outside it’s June. Her lips are blue.
Mercedes wraps her in several blankets and feeds her pretend blancmange. “Pretend” because the dish is unavailable to them outside the realm of fiction, and because all Frances can manage to eat for the next couple of days is pretend food.
Where’s Mumma? What with a freezing child in one bedroom and a burning hot infant in another? She’s downstairs cleaning. The house is spotless.
May Jesus have mercy on the Soul of
Kathleen Cecilia Piper
Died June 20, 1919
Age 19
“We have loved her in life. Let us not abandon her, until we have conducted her by our prayers into the house of the Lord.” ST. AMBROSE
Solace Art. Co. - 202 E. 44th St. N.Y.
Frances stops shivering in time to attend Kathleen’s funeral but she still hasn’t eaten any real-life food. By now she has already lost her conscious grip on the events of two nights ago, when the babies were born. She has shivered them away. The cave mind has entered into a creative collaboration with the voluntary mind, and soon the two of them will cocoon memory in a spinning wealth of dreams and yarns and fingerpaintings. Fact and truth, fact and truth…. “Where’s my nightgown, the one with the — I spilled something, I have to wash it, remember that fish I caught in the creek that time? — I did, I did, there are so fish in there — it had a thin blue stripe but I let it go, it was just a baby fish, too small to eat, I threw it back, it swam away, back to the ocean….”
But the nightgown is long gone — committed to earth by James, who made of it a shroud for an infant boy.
And as for the fish, everyone knows there have never been any fish to be caught in the creek. The only thing anyone’s ever going to catch in that creek is polio.
On the day after Kathleen’s funeral, on the third day following Kathleen’s death, Frances is still fasting when she is overcome by a powerful craving. She goes to the kitchen, where Mumma is getting ready to clean the oven. She opens a long cupboard and takes the lid off the flour bin. She fills her hands with the white dust and carries it carefully across the kitchen and upstairs to her room. Materia sweeps up the thin white trail behind Frances without a word, without looking up, without following it beyond the border of the kitchen linoleum.
Once in her bedroom — the one she shares with Mercedes — Frances releases the flour from her hands into the empty porcelain wash-basin on her dresser. She adds water from the pitcher and mixes it with her hands until she has a soft sticky dough. She takes the dough in both hands, curls up on her bed and begins to suck on it. At first she sucks rapidly, making little sounds, then more slowly as the craving subsides. Her eyelids get heavy and she falls asleep, her mouth filled with the soft moist mass.
Mercedes enters carrying a tray heaped with invisible delicacies. Frances’s lips still suck a little intermittently in her sleep. Mercedes puts down the tray, careful not to upset the flagon of port and send it streaming into the blancmange. She bends over Frances and feels her forehead, then gently pries the glutinous white blob from her mouth. She carries it downstairs, following the trail of white powder back to where it ends at the kitchen linoleum, and stops. Not because the trail stops. But because of what she sees. Mumma. Mercedes stands staring, the raw dough cupped in her hands like an offering. She was going to bake it for Frances. It’s not good to eat raw dough, you might get worms. Mercedes was going to bake it in the oven. But her mother is using the oven. Mercedes stands there for a long time, with her hands full of wet white dust.
See No Evil
On the night when Lily and Ambrose were born, Mercedes was awakened by the same racket that woke Frances. But Mercedes stayed in bed, while Frances crept out to the attic stairs. Mercedes held onto the blankets just under her chin and said the rosary, even though she was too scared to turn and reach for the beads where they lay under her pillow. It was after this night that Mercedes started actually to wear a rosary on her person, because sometimes even under the pillow is too far away when it comes to a rosary. So Mercedes said the rosary with the tufted nubs of the chenille bedspread instead:
Mercedes stares hard at a row of white tufts but she has trouble getting the rosary going, not because it’s just a bedspread, but because of the Devil. Only the Devil would block her mind with a picture of the wooden backscratcher that leans against the mirror on her bureau. You can’t see it now, it’s too dark, but it’s there. A long wooden backscratcher carved with three monkeys doing “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” and at the tip of it are three prongs curved like claws for scratching. It was a joke gift from a friend of Mumma’s at the Empire. Mercedes has just realized that it is an evil thing, and in the morning she will put it in the garbage. No, the furnace. In the morning. When it’s light and the sounds from up in the attic have stopped. Someone just started hammering the wall up there. Maybe they’re hanging a picture.
Mercedes fights the Devil and wins. She manages to make the backscratcher disappear from her mind, she banishes it with the first prayer that’s able to break through — “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule and guide. Amen.” Quick, before the evil picture comes back, quick, “Hail Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus …,” and the rosary is safely started. And once it’s started, you can just keep going around and around for as long as you want or need, following the stepping-stones of the bedspread. Yes, in an emergency you can say the rosary anywhere, provided you have faith.