Mercedes always crosses the street when she sees Helen Frye. Helen looks wistfully at Mercedes, although she has given up saying hello. The Fryes must know by now how wrong they were, no doubt Helen has shed her share of hot tears. Good enough for them. Mercedes hasn’t wasted time on silly girlfriends since Frye. She has been too busy with school and family. Here is the order of priorities: God, family, school, piano, friends.
Mercedes will soon turn seventeen — November is the one month when she and Frances are the same age. Mercedes is in her final year of high school. She is a definite for a scholarship to St Frances Xavier University on the mainland. Surely Daddy will be able to spare her by then. She tries not to be selfish about it, but she wants so badly to go to university. It’s too late for her other ambition: to be the best student ever to grace the halls of Holy Angels. She has settled for being the best Mount Carmel has ever seen, and among the best in the province. All this and cooking and cleaning and babysitting too. Mercedes tries not to be proud — only grateful. Think of how many girls never even get to finish high school. Think of the poor children who share a single pair of shoes among a whole family.
Mercedes leaves the church, raises her umbrella and walks down Plummer Avenue through the steady drizzle, nodding polite greetings left and right. Despite her youth, many people call her “Miss Piper”. It seems natural. Partly because of her bearing and good works. Partly because of her grooming. She is swathed in tweed, crisp in a white blouse and black necktie, gloved, with a straw boater angled on her pale bun. She never fails to wear a hat and gloves, not just out of seemliness but because, summer or winter, she darkens rather too readily. In Paris, Coco Chanel has just invented the suntan, but word hasn’t reached New Waterford. Beneath it all, Mercedes is decently corseted and petticoated. Frances has told her she looks as though she just stepped out of the Time Machine. But good taste is always in style. Truly, civilization is a thin veneer. For what have we to distinguish us from the beasts of the field? Besides, of course, an immortal soul? Manners, and suitable attire.
One effect of cultivating the virtue of charity is the realization that the Mahmouds over in Sydney require her prayers. So along with the dead, Mercedes prays for her unknown relatives. She is praying for them now, inwardly, as she passes the new gasoline pumps and nods to Mr MacIsaac. It slipped her mind in church, but there is no such thing as an inconvenient moment when it comes to prayer. That’s the marvellous thing about it. “Please, dear God, don’t judge too harshly Your servants in Sydney who cast out their own flesh and blood. Amen.”
Although Mercedes was too young to respond mercifully to the first twenty-five years of disaster, she has been working hard to make up for it. And there’s plenty of time; this is, after all, only 1929. In the grievously wounded but still young twentieth century, Mercedes finishes her prayer with a discreet sign of the cross etched with her index finger upon her thumb and turns into Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian to buy a roast for Sunday’s supper.
Luvovitz’s Delikatessen has expanded to include fruits, vegetables, tinned goods, dry goods, and bins of bulk comestibles, because few people can afford to buy meat on a regular basis.
The bell rings as Mercedes opens the door, and Ralph Luvovitz looks up from behind the counter. The tips of his adorable sticking-out ears turn as red as the stripes in his apron when he sees her. Mercedes looks as young as she is the moment she smiles at him. They exchange pleasantries, avoiding and catching one another’s eyes, as he draws out the process of measuring and cutting brown paper, unwinding a length of string, selecting just the right roast, wrapping it and tying it up. At the end of the process it seems to slip his mind that Mercedes is waiting for him to hand the package to her. Neither does Mercedes remind him.
“How is the clarinet going, Ralph?” she enquires.
“I’ve been practising” —
“Good, are you —?”
“Are you —? sorry —”
“Sorry.”
Smile.
“Are you still able to come over Sunday evening?” asks Ralph.
“Oh yes. May I bring the girls?”
“Of course, that’d be grand.”
Smile.
Mercedes reflects, not for the first time, that Ralph’s shiny brown eyes and sandy curls are somehow more pleasing than Valentino’s turban and charcoal glowers. Perhaps it’s because, if she reached out right now, she could touch Ralph. She blushes afresh and fumbles for the roast. Ralph drops it.
They’ve known one another all their lives, but suddenly over the past few months they’ve become terribly polite. It is a change that is not lost on Mrs Luvovitz, who is taking inventory across the aisle.
Mercedes is a good girl. A wonderful girl. I helped bring her into this world. I loved her mother like a daughter. But.
The problem is, if Mr and Mrs Luvovitz are to have grandchildren — Jewish grandchildren — well, it can’t be a shayna Catholic maidela, now can it?
“Relax,” Benny has told her.
“How can I relax? You want a Catholic grandchild?”
“A grandchild would be nice.”
Mrs Luvovitz gets choked up and can’t continue the argument. Benny says, “Come here, come here.”
She does. He says, “You want he should go away to school, and you want he should stay home.” She nods. He says, “You want he should be a doctor, and you want he should be a grocer.” She nods again, smiling now through tears. “And,” says Benny, “he should marry a nice Jewish girl and move into a house down the street.” She nods, stuffing a hanky in between his shoulder and her nose.
“You know, liebkeit, we’re the ones who came here. If we’d stayed in the Old Country there’d be plenty of nice Jewish girls. It’s not Ralph’s fault we made him be born here.” He pauses. “And it’s not his fault that….”
But he doesn’t have to continue. They both know. If Abe and Rudy had not been killed in the war, Mrs Luvovitz would not have such a problem letting Ralph marry Mercedes.
Over the tins of Dutch cleanser, Mrs Luvovitz watches Mercedes count out the money for Ralph and she watches him meticulously place it in the cash register. She sees him slip a chocolate rosebud into Mercedes’ hand before she leaves.
Mercedes exits Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian feeling light-headed. Maintaining the pink glow on her cheeks for several blocks is the thought of what her and Ralph’s children would look like. Mercedes Luvovitz. Mrs Ralph Luvovitz. Their children would be Catholic, of course.
Mercedes indulges herself until King Street, then reins in her thoughts and remembers to open her umbrella. I wonder if Frances and Lily went on their picnic. I hope not, in this weather.
She turns onto Water Street and sees that Daddy is not yet home. Just as well. I feel like a little lie-down before starting supper.
Mercedes mounts the stairs to her room. The house is quiet. Lily and Frances must have gone on their picnic after all. It’s sweet of Frances to play with Lily so much — it means Lily’s not constantly on my hands — but I could wish Frances had a friend her own age. A nice one.
Mercedes lies down on her perfectly made bed, and allows her eyes to travel contentedly about her room. She has only fine things. Books. On her bedside table she has framed the old photograph of Mumma and Daddy in the archway. And safely hidden is the one surviving photograph of Kathleen — hmm, what’s it doing on the floor, it’s always tucked inside Jane Eyre where Daddy won’t have to come across it. Mercedes reaches down, picks up the photo and puts it on her bedside table. She’ll tuck it back into the book after she has a little zizz.