Mrs Luvovitz woke up because she heard something. A woman singing, of all things. She couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t wake Benny. Hard not to think “banshee” — sometimes they wail, sometimes they weep or just sing softly, but their message is always the same: someone will cross over. By the time Mrs Luvovitz got her eyes properly open the singing had ended. But she looked out the front window anyhow — nothing. Just to be sure, she went downstairs and opened the back door, and that’s when she got the fright — a figure stood in her garden, with its back to her.
Fear turned to surprise the next instant when Mrs Luvovitz recognized the shape.
“Materia?”
Materia does not turn around, she does not stir. She is a ripe stalk planted in shallow soil, top-heavy, about to fall over roots-up. Just a baby’s breath will do it now.
Mrs Luvovitz walks between the beans and tomatoes until she is close enough to touch Materia’s arm. It is cool and smooth and plump. Materia’s hair is loose. It hangs in wiry black waves that just touch her shoulders. She’s wearing one of the loose cotton dresses that Mrs Luvovitz helped her sew, soft and favourite now with age, covered in faded wild flowers.
Materia turns at the touch and Mrs Luvovitz sees the front of her. “Gott in Himmel.”
Materia stands in Mrs Luvovitz’s tub while Mrs Luvovitz washes her. They’re in the kitchen with the fire going. The water is black with coal-dust and blood. Materia’s dress is on the floor, the front of it is a scab, it will be thrown out. Mrs Luvovitz washes her gently, no scrubbing, no cloth, with her soap-sliding hands only, as though Materia were a newborn. It’s a milky skin Materia has, not in colour but in texture, all curves, compact muscle under a soft sheath. Materia doesn’t say anything. All the effort and anxiety of distinguishing one thing from another drained away for ever, all distances now equal — Mrs Luvovitz’s face and the Cape of Good Hope, Materia’s own warm body and the rest of the world.
Mrs Luvovitz has sent Benny to the Piper house to find out what in God’s name is going on over there. When he arrives he finds James in a clean white shirt making tea, at three-thirty a.m. The house is very warm, hot. Kathleen is dead upstairs under fresh linen. There’s an infant girl asleep in a crib by the stove.
“I’m sorry for your trouble, James.”
“Thank you, Ben. Will you have a drink?”
“Cuppa tea.”
In the morning, Mercedes awakens next to Frances and sees a black smudge on her little sister’s forehead. It looks like ashes from the fireplace. Mercedes licks her finger and cleans it off. Frances sleeps on. While dressing, Mercedes notices a similar smudge on her own forehead. She wipes it away. Frances wakes up.
“Mercedes, I dreamt that the lady who gave me the candy came into our room last night.”
“What lady?”
“The dark lady. She touched me.”
Mercedes knows that it was the Devil and that they were protected by the rosary. The Devil would leave a coal smudge on your forehead. It would be like him to mock what the priest does on Ash Wednesday. And it couldn’t have been Our Lady. Everyone knows Our Lady is pure white in a blue dress.
“It was just a dream, Frances.”
“She was beautiful.”
Mercedes says a silent prayer for her sister.
“She’s my fairy godmother,” says Frances.
Mercedes puts the rosary around Frances’s neck and goes downstairs to help Mumma make breakfast. Frances curls up on her side and shivers.
Daddy is waiting for Mercedes in the kitchen. He has made porridge for her. She sits down at the table.
“Good morning, Daddy.”
“I need you to be a big girl, Mercedes.”
He looks at her. They have the same eyes, though hers are brown. Their faces are of sandstone, though hers is tinged with olive. Mercedes understands that the worst is coming and unfolds her serviette, placing it neatly on her lap. She’s glad she took special care with her braids this morning.
“Your sister Kathleen has been taken away from us.”
“Has she gone to New York City?”
“She’s gone to God.”
A gap opens up in Mercedes’ stomach. She bridges it by picking up her spoon. “Thank you for breakfast, Daddy.”
“I need you to look after your mother.”
“Is Mumma sick?”
“No. But she’s very tired. She’s just had a baby.”
“Oh.” Mercedes shows her teeth politely and gets her first permanent wrinkle. “A boy or a girl?”
“Another little sister for you.”
“Oh.” The second permanent wrinkle.
“Mumma is very sad about losing Kathleen. She’s too tired to look after the new baby.”
“I’ll look after it.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Don’t worry, Daddy.”
The Official Version
She endured the most severe trials with a calmness, fortitude and resignation which are the best proofs of the innocence of her life.
EPITAPH, HALIFAX CEMETERY
Materia had done the Roman Catholic thing; the mother had died. And James, of course, had not been in attendance at the birth and had therefore been in no position to apprehend the danger or to intervene. So there was no inquest, and the examining doctor and the undertaker kept the details to themselves and their wives.
One child was born.
Kathleen looked lovely, God rest her soul, so young and lifelike. Just as though she were asleep. They buried her in white, it should have been her wedding dress. The influenza, you know, there’s not a family on three continents hasn’t been touched by it. And her with her God-given gift and her whole life ahead of her.
Everyone knew that Kathleen was pregnant and that she died of the child. You’d have to be an idiot not to have figured that out, what with the girl’s hasty home-coming and incarceration in the house. But the thing you do in a case like this is go along with the idea that the child is the offspring of its grandparents. Everyone agrees to this fiction, and the only people who’d breathe a word of the actual facts to the illegitimate child are those who are so malicious to begin with that they are easily dismissed as liars. As in truth they are. For the beneficent lie tells the truth about the child, which is “you belong to this community,” whereas the malicious truth-tellers use fact to convey a lie, which is “you don’t belong”. This is an imperfect system but it’s the prevailing one. And as the years go by the facts get eroded and scattered by time, until there are more people who don’t know than people who do.
Mahmoud Mourns
Mahmoud never wants to see Materia or her husband or her children or any evidence of them ever again. The only communication he’s had with the Piper family for the past nineteen years has been the business arrangement with James, and they’ve both done well out of that while never once coming face to face. But that’s over now.
Kathleen was the one Mahmoud invested in, was proud of, but he ought to have known that exposing the girl and her gift to the world was exactly prostitution. She went out and reaped the wages of her parents’ vanity (in the case of James) and stupidity (in the case of Materia) and wound up a tramp. It’s what happens. Where did she do it, who did she let do it to her and how often, who was it, some Anglo dog son-of-an-enklese-bitch with no respect for people’s daughters, or worse, a Jew, New York is full with them, or worse, a coloured man — likewise thronging in that city — and once that’s in the blood it sleeps there for generations until you least expect it, where was her father when his daughter was being ruined in the worst city in the world, where people mate like mongrels? And now a bastard in the family, another girl to boot, my son-in-law is truly cursed. Bad from the beginning, bad in the end, I wash my hands.