And yet it tried his patience.
“Materia, you can’t spend all your time wandering the shore and fooling around on the piano,” for lately she’d begun playing whatever came into her head whether it made sense or not — mixing up fragments of different pieces in bizarre ways, playing a hymn at top speed, making a B-minor dirge out of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and all with the heavy hand of a barrelhouse hack. James found it disturbing, unhealthy even. Besides, he couldn’t study with that racket.
“I’m sorry, James.”
“Why don’t you play something nice?”
At which she struck up “The Maple Leaf Rag” and he yelled at her for the first time. She laughed, pleased to have gotten a rise. He decided to ignore her after that. Which made her cry — again — but, frankly, he’d figured out her tricks by now, she was just looking for attention.
On Labour Day he turned down an invitation to bring the wife and come to a McCurdy employee boat ride and picnic. He told himself he had no desire to socialize with ready-made gentlemen, it was enough that he worked beside them; if he once gave himself the spurious comfort of a social life he might get sidetracked. But deep down he winced at the thought of showing Materia to anyone. He was grateful they lived in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her any more, he did. It was just that, recently, it had struck him that other people might think there was something strange. They might think he’d married a child.
By September she had puffed up and turned sallow. He began sleeping on a cot by the kitchen stove. “It’s for your own good, my dear, I don’t want to roll over and gouge the baby with an elbow.”
Pound, pound, pound on the piano keys in the middle of the night. No wit any more, however juvenile, no naughty ditties, just discords. Tantrums. Fine, let her exhaust herself. Plank, splank, splunk into the wee hours. In the mornings he would rise from his kitchen cot as though he’d slept perfectly well, pack his own lunch, pat her on the head and cycle off to work on iron tires.
By Hallowe’en she was big as a house. One evening he came home to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of molasses-cookie dough, for that was what the ingredients lined up on the table indicated. He was delighted. Her first attempt at cooking. He even gave her a kiss to show just how pleased he was, but when he went to dip a finger in the dough the bowl had been licked clean.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
She just looked queasily straight ahead.
“Answer me.”
She just sat there, bloated.
“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you think? Haven’t you got anything to say for yourself?”
The blank stare, the flaccid face. He grabbed the bowl.
“Or are you just a lump of dough?”
No answer.
“Answer me!”
He hurled the bowl at her feet and it broke. She ran outside and threw up. He watched her hunched and huge over the back steps. You’d think by now she’d know enough not to bring it on, a dumb animal knows not to make itself upthrow. Well she can stay out there till I’ve cleaned up this mess.
He swept the floor and scrubbed it too. He got a lot of work done that evening, not to mention some clear thinking. He locked the piano and pocketed the key. Then he said, “I’m not cooking any more and I’m not cleaning. You do your job, missus, ’cause Lord knows I’m doing mine.”
She looked so sad and dumpy. He had a pang of pity. Did all women get this ugly?
“I’m sorry, James,” she said and started crying. At least it was better than that weird staring she’d been at lately. He let her hug him, knowing it would calm her. He didn’t want to be cruel. He hoped the child would be fair.
Materia went upstairs to the attic. She knelt down, opened the hope chest and inhaled deeply. James thought Materia hadn’t filled the hope chest because she had nothing to put in it. But she kept it empty on purpose, so that nothing could come between her and the magical smell that beckoned her into memory. Cedar. She hung her head into the empty chest and allowed its gentle breath to lift and bear her away … baked earth and irrigated olive groves; the rippling veil of the Mediterranean, her grandfather’s silk farm; the dark elixir of her language, her mother’s hands stuck with parsley and cinnamon, her mother’s hands stroking her forehead, braiding her hair … her mother’s hands. The smell of the hope chest. The Cedars of Lebanon. She stopped crying, and fell asleep.
The Jewish Lady
Mrs Luvovitz had seen the pregnant woman sitting on the cliff’s edge. Like a fixture warning ships, or luring them. People around here believed in kelpies. Mrs Luvovitz’s imagination had been infected. What could you expect with so many Catholics? They saw omens in everything. Where Mrs Luvovitz came from they called them golems.
Maybe there’s something wrong with the woman, thought Mrs Luvovitz, maybe she’s simple. Because when Mrs Luvovitz had passed by on the Shore Road to Sydney with her cartload of eggs the other day, she had heard the woman singing what sounded like nonsense words. A poor simple-minded woman from down north in the hills perhaps. They marry their cousins once too often. But as yet Mrs Luvovitz had never seen the woman’s face, for she always wore a plaid kerchief that had the effect of blinkers.
Mrs Luvovitz had asked her husband, Benny, if he’d seen the pregnant woman, but he never had.
“Mr Luvovitz, you must have.”
“I haven’t, Mrs Luvovitz.”
“She’s there every day.”
“Maybe she’s a ghost.”
“Get out, Ben.”
Benny laughed. He knew her weakness.
Mrs Luvovitz had resolved to speak to the woman next time, because by now she was beginning to suspect she’d been all too Celtified. She needed to satisfy herself that the woman was human and not an omen. If an omen, it was important to determine certain things: “When do I usually see her? In the morning? Or evening?” A forerunner seen in the morning meant death was still a ways off. Seen in the evening, it meant get ready. A child meant the death of an innocent.
On this day, Mrs Luvovitz was driving the Shore Road from Sydney as usual, having sold all her eggs. — “A dozen Jewish eggs, please.” — She could hardly keep up. Likewise Benny, who delivered meat in his ice-box wagon.
“Hello,” said Mrs Luvovitz, pulling up her horse.
The bright kerchief fluttered in the sea breeze; it was a nice day but that could mean anything.
“Hello there,” Mrs Luvovitz repeated.
“Hello, hello!” cried little Abe beside her.
The plaid kerchief turned and Mrs Luvovitz said to herself, “Gott in Himmel!” A pregnant child. A dark little thing, too, she must be from away. Or from Indian Brook maybe. Mrs Luvovitz forgot all about ghosts and golems. “Where are you from, dear, who’s your mother?” — falling into the local formula.
“I haven’t got a mother.”
“Get in the cart, girl.”
It was surprising to find out that the child belonged to that big new white house across the way. Mrs Luvovitz had never seen her come or go, just appear, as it were, on the cliff.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen and three-quarters.”
Ay-yay-yay, and married to that young fella. It was illegal, of course. Where did he get her? — a child bride. From overseas somewhere, was she Eyetalian? A Gypsy? What was the accent? Mrs Luvovitz made tea and entertained these and other questions. All would be revealed, she’d see to that, but first, tea. Where she came from and where she lived now, tea meant a spread. She placed a plate of cookies before Materia, who said, “What’s that?”